Samsung BD-UP5000 Heavily Flawed!

[D.J.KRIME]

I have had the plesure of spending a while over the Crimbo period in the states and my friend who lives there recentaly purchased the much anticipated Samsung BD-UP5000 duo HD/Blu-Ray plaeyer but it is with sadness that I must report that it found itself re-packed and returned to the store due to major glitches with both vision and sound, some discs would only access extra features like PIP and leave the main movie screen black but with backgroung audio from the movie. These problems occoured with discs from both HD camps.

I wait with baited breath to see what the WhatHifi team make of the player when it hits our shores as I am sure for a lot of us out there a Duo HD player is the best way forward with HD films provideing it works properly that is!

 

[Anonymous]

There is a discussion on the US forums about the BD-UP5000 and its flaws. The concerning ones for me are the lack of TrueHD over the analogue outputs (I don't have an HDMI amp) and it only sending two channel TrueHD over HDMI.

A guy claimed that Samsung had temporarily stopped shipping the player, maybe to put new firmware on it? I guess that this is the reason why Samsung are saying the player "may" be available in March, it has too many problems in the US!

I am still keeping an eye on this one, but I might just get a Profile 1.1 Blu-ray player instead, depend how long all of this new stuff is going to take to get to the UK.

 

[Anonymous]

seems strange that you never hear many faults from the tosh hd players. maybe hd dvd may win the war, hopefully it will, and the players are cheaper and have ethernet ports for updates.

 

[Anonymous]

[quote user="bobbys"]seems strange that you never hear many faults from the tosh hd players. maybe hd dvd may win the war, hopefully it will, and the players are cheaper and have ethernet ports for updates.[/quote]

The hardware isn't faulty, it is the firmware. The BD-UP5000 was rushed out in the US for a Christmas launch, a big mistake since the firmware doesn't appear to be great, just acceptable. It'll probably get fixed, just like other players have been.

On paper, the specification on this machine is very good, but for me it is lacking in the analogue audio department, and yes it has an Ethernet port so you can get the extra content of HD-DVD! In future all Blu-ray Profile 2.0 players will need an Ethernet port anyway.

 

[Anonymous]

From the CES reports, it seems there is a fair chance that Samsung will skip the 5000 and offer the UK its later UP5500 instead. Right on it's heals will be the UP6500 which is promised to be profile 2.0 and sport the much rated HQV playback chip. And profile 2.0, also known as Live HD, will be a feature on Panasonic's Blu-ray only DMP-BD50.

How sad a post is that!!

 

[D.J.KRIME]

I still fail to understand why with the majority of the HD players from either camp that the units do not support HD sound codecs over 7.1 outputs for those of us with slightly older amps not equiped with HDMI. It is almost as if with the arrival of these new HD players that the Makers are trying to force us into having to part with even more money to replace our amps if we want to truely enjoy all that HD has too offer even tho our current Amps are more than able to do the job given the right outputs on the HD players.