Samsung BD-P1500 review

We also have to applaud everything about the way this player interacts with the user. The interface is very clear, and remote commands are handled straight away, with no lag. This is certainly a wonderful improvement over players such as the Sony BDP-S500, which can barely fast forward without a letter of approval from Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer. Oh, and on the subject of scanning, the Samsung can move through the disc at speeds of up to 128 times. That's mostly useless, but it's handy to be able to go at 4x and 8x speeds.

When you first insert a disc, the player mechanism goes a bit mad and makes a loud noise, but that soon settles down and once you're watching a movie you can barely hear it operating. That's the right way around for our tastes, so we're not to fussed about the noise early on, especially not when interactive content is loading (slowly) and we need something to distract us.

The picture quality of the P1500 is good, if not overwhelming. We tested some of our regular discs to get an idea how it handled different kinds of material. Casino Royale looked good, but we noticed some de-interlacing artefacts at times. We also felt the image was one of the softer ones we've seen from a Blu-ray player, which might put some people off. Of course, picture sharpness is a matter of taste, so a less sharp image might appeal to some.

DVD upscaling was pretty decent, too. We used Jurassic Park as our test-bench and were impressed by the results. There wasn't excessive MPEG noise, and colours were good, although people did look slightly too pink at times. Overall, though, it's not bad if you've got a large DVD collection.

We used an external Onkyo decoder to listen to audio, which sounded fantastic over HDMI. Stereo analogue audio can be output via RCA jacks, but if you can, we'd really advise you get at least a 2.1 channel speaker system, to improve the quality of your sound experience. And never use those built-in TV speakers, please. Have we made ourselves clear?

Conclusion
Admittedly the BD-P1500 is noisy at first, and it is quite a chunky player. But it's actually very simple to use, is spry in its operation and can chuck a 1080/24p picture on your TV like the best of them. Considering the price, we seriously think this is a player worthy of your consideration.

If you're looking for a profile 2.0 player at around this price range, you're going to be looking for a long time. The Panasonic DMP-BD35 is an excellent player, but at £300 it's a fair amount more expensive. Samsung will soon launch some new players, which we expect to be even better, but they will probably cost more as well.

Edited by Marian Smith