Samsung BD-P1400 Review

[tonyvdb]

Sonnie asked me to post a review on this player so here it goes:

I purchased a Samsung BD-P1400 BluRay Player on Boxing Day up here in Canada. My first impressions are that it does a great job of playing BluRay content and works as a fantastic upconverter for SD DVDs as well.

As I have only had it for about two weeks and only played three BluRay discs on it and a couple of SD discs my review won't be as detailed as it could be with more time.

First of all as soon as I got it home I hooked it up and had a look at the setup menu, It is well thought out and the GUI is nice and clean. I then hooked the Samsung up to the Internet via the LAN port on the back of the player. After a reboot (power down and restart) of the player it went to the "system upgrade" section to do a firmware upgrade and the settings were already correct as it automatically detects them. I then selected "upgrade start' and the Samsung showed the message that a new upgrade was found and I selected the "start" button. I then saw a message not to disconnect or turn off the player until upgrade was finished. I assumed that it would take a while so i walked away and let it do its thing.
I returned about 10 min later to see that it was still in the upgrade mode.....20 min later a message popped up saying that the upgrade could not be completed with an exit button, I tried again two more times but it would not do the upgrade as I would get the same screen over and over. Frustrated with this I decided to download the firmware via my PC and burn to CDr using a proper ISO burning program. I inserted the CDr into the Samsung and it immediately came up with the upgrade screen, selecting start was all I needed to do. The upgrade finished without a hitch in about 25 min.
I put in the only BlueRay DVD that I had at the time Disney's "Underdog" and played the opening previews. To my amazement the preview was a demo of the capabilities of BluRay and it had several long clips of Disney movies including Cars, I have the SD version of Cars and was very impressed with its picture quality but the BluRay quality was night and day...even my wife immediately said WOW thats really good when she saw it.
That evening we all sat down as a family and watched the movie, The player had no problems playing the movie and it seemed to switch to proper film mode without an issue and the audio DD uncompressed was noticeably better than the standard DD audio. Also the player seemed to connect automatically to the Internet and download the added features that were available.
Later that week I bought Disney's Pixar collection and it also played without problems, the newer Pixar animated films looked fantastic even on my Sanyo Z2 720p projector. The Onkyo TX-SR805 handled the A/V flawlessly although there was one spot on the Underdog movie that there was some clipping and it didn't matter what volume level I had the receiver at. After playing around with a bunch of settings it seems to be in the mastering of the uncompressed audio on the DVD not the player or the Onkyo as in standard DD it did not do it and I had no issues with any other parts of that disc or the Pixar one.
I have also watched the new Rush Hour 3 Bluray DVD and the DTS HD 7.1 audio track played without and distortion or clipping. The video was great and as usual funny. The video quality was very good but not as good as the animated Pixar films but still better than what SD DVDs looked like on my old LG upconverting player.

Ok, Now for some comparisons to the Toshiba A2 HD DVD player:

First of all I have both players hooked up Via HDMI running to an Onkyo TX SR805.
The Samsung supports all the Audio formats available through HDMI including HD DVD, DTS HD Audio and the DD uncompressed audio formats and has all 7.1 analog outputs on the back. The A2 does not output these via HDMI as it does the conversion in the player and sends that through HDMI to the receiver and has no analog audio outputs.

The Samsung starts up slightly faster than the Toshiba but that is to be expected as its newer.
Startup times with no disc:
Samsung - 28 seconds
Toshiba - 39 seconds

Playback:
Both players quality with High definition video is great and I have no issues with either. This is where the Toshiba or just the HD format seems to have a edge, all the HD DVDs I have, have a nicer menu interface. The overlay of options and just the interactivity of the menu's are nicer over BluRay.
Both players load the discs at a reasonable speed and depending on what downloaded content is available this can take longer depending on the movie if your connected to the Internet.
The A2 has one issue in that is it doesn't seem to detect Film mode automatically on some discs so I have to select it in the setup menu.

Upconverting SD DVD's:
I have taken the same SD DVD (Cars) and played it on both players. Now after reading reviews the Samsung has been said to do a really good job as it uses the HQV Reon processor that is said to be the best. Other reports say that the Toshiba AX2 does an even better job but at I do not have that player I can not comment. comparing the A2 to the 1400 the Samsung has a slight edge but only slight both players upconverted the SD version of Cars very well and really the only thing I could see was the Samsung seemed to have no rough edges around sharp objects where the Toshiba had an almost softer edging. But it was so little that unless your looking closely you just don't see it.

So my take on it is even with the roomers of HD DVD being done if you can get an HD player for less than $100 they make a fantastic upconverter for SD DVDs and this way you dont put undue ware on the Samsung or whatever BluRay player you have.

Over all the Samsung BD-P1400 gets a out of 5 for overall quality. I would have given it 5 stars but the not downloading the firmware via LAN bothered me as the Toshiba had no problem with it.

One final note, I had a DVD+r movie (The Railrodder) an old classic with Buster Keaton that would not play on the Samsung but worked fine in the Toshiba A2 so my thought on this is that the Samsung doesn't like DVD+r discs.

[Sonnie]

Thanks for the review Tony...

If you plan to and get a chance to watch Live Free Die Hard on it, let me know if you have any issues. I believe I've read reports where it hangs or has problems playing.

This is definitely a player I am considering and would save me some money over a PS3.

[tonyvdb]

Sonnie wrote:

If you plan to and get a chance to watch Live Free Die Hard on it, let me know if you have any issues. I believe I've read reports where it hangs or has problems playing.

We already saw it in SD as I had no idea that i would have a BluRay player. so we bought it on SD DVD

This is definitely a player I am considering and would save me some money over a PS3.

For the price I think its the best bang for buck. The Panny is a far bit more and I doubt the difference is that great.
The PS3 is still a gaming machine first and although it works great as a BluRay player I just dont see it as being easy to use as a video player because of the cost of the remote and not being compatible with the Harmony.

[tonyvdb]

Reading some early reviews on this player the first ones to role off the assembly line had troubles playing all BluRay DVDs from Fox a firmware update has fixed the problem. This included Live Free or Die Hard

[Sonnie]

That's good news!

I'm really struggling between this player and the PS3. I'm beginning to lean towards this one though.

[imbeaujp]

Thanks for the review !

[tonyvdb]

Interesting update:

This may or may not be a good thing, not that I'm unhappy about it as the Player still does a great job of playback but there seems to be conflicting reports as to weather the 1400 uses the Silicon Optix Reon chip I have heard that Samsung dropped it for the Sigma Designs HD decoder chip for its video processing. althought not a bad chip I really wonder if it holds up to the Reon. The Samsung BD-P1200 did use the Silicon Optix Reon chip.

[Sonnie]

Hmmm... I don't see anything on the Samsung site that tells us one way or another. I wonder where the original info on the Reon chip came from?

[MrPorterhouse]

I believe the 1200 used the Reon, but the 1400 does NOT. The 1400 is a better BD player that fixed some annoying bugs with the 1200, but the 1200 would probably be a better DVD upconverter.