Review: Samsung BD-P1200 Blu-ray Player

Samsung took charge in the Blu-ray race last year with its first player in the heated high def disc dash. Now its second player has entered the fray and it comes loaded with some pretty formidable offerings.

With a little time under its belt, Samsung took the pieces it did right with its original player and carried them over to this model. The end product is a strong high definition machine for home theater enthusiasts.

The BD-P1200 is a bit smaller than the company’s first entry, though not by much. It sports an attractive, simple design in glossy black and the requisite blue LED lights that all new products seem to wear these days. Aside from the standard playback and navigation buttons, a welcome button is the output button on the front which lets you select what video output to use without requiring you to go through the player’s onscreen menu.

On the back you’ll find the standard analog jacks (the player can output video up to 1080i through it’s component jacks) plus the HDMI jack for digitally connecting the player to your display. Of note is the fact that this player supports HDMI 1.3 while most other high definition players on the market (with the exception of the Playstation 3) are still stuck in HDMI 1.2. This is, however, not a terribly big deal in light of the fact that some of the major benefits of 1.3, Deep Color and support of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master, won’t fly with this product—Deep Color requires both the display and the disc to support the feature (which currently none do) and the two high def audio formats are not supported or decoded by the BD-P1200. The player does support Dolby Digital Plus as well as standard Dolby Digital and DTS.

Also new to Samsung is the inclusion of an Ethernet jack on the back of the player. This is for firmware upgrades (updates can also be done via a CD-R), and luckily, one was available while E-Gear had the unit for testing. The firmware upgrade added the important Java compatibility which makes playback of some of the new advanced disc features possible. The Blu-ray Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest won’t play without the update.

The player will output high definition video to either the component or HDMI outputs. Component output is limited to 1080i. The HDMI output supports output up to 1080p in either 60Hz or 24Hz. The 24Hz output theoretically should produce a better picture because it’s taking the frame rate direct from the disc with no conversion (film is recorded at 24Hz) but few TVs will accept this signal, and I haven’t been able to tell the difference on screen anyway.

For standard DVDs, the player will upscale the 480p signal to 1080p via HDMI using Silicon Optic’s excellent Reon processing chip (for more on the Reon chip see the Toshiba XA2 review on page 41). The player does a great job of upscaling standard video, but as with any player, the results are nothing compared to a true high definition disc.

Video performance of the Samsung was outstanding. When watching the aforementioned Pirates disc, details were realistic (as realistic as an octopus-faced man can be); colors were deep and rich and blacks and shadow details were impressive. Startup time and navigation lag were improved over last year’s model, though the player does still take a bit longer to recognize a Blu-ray disc than a typical DVD player takes for a DVD. I experienced no playback errors during my review period.

The player’s got a few extra goodies, including support for MP3 discs, standard CDs (which the Pioneer BD and LG BD/HD DVD players do not). It won’t play DVD+R disc, but it will play DVD-R. Another feature is support of HDMI:CEC (see this month’s Cheat Sheet for details) which Samsung calls AnyNet, so you can easily control both your TV and Blu-ray player from one
remote. yy