Review Horizon

1. Introduction

Without a doubt, Samsung BD-C7500 looks really nice. Described as the world’s slimmest Blu-ray player BD-C7500 brings not only good looks in the equation but also a large set of media streaming features, a fast boot time and a plethora of web clients thanks to Samsung Apps store, the first store by my knowledge to offer applications to run on both TV and media streaming boxes / Blu-ray players. Let’s not forget that Apple TV doesn’t support applications and Google TV’s Android Marketplace compatibility will only arrive next year.

While Blu-ray capabilities of today’s players are fairly good and I doubt many of us could perceive differences in the output quality, especially on a HDMI connection, the media streaming and web clients implementation differ wildly, and this is what makes the subject of today’s review. The screenshot and observations should apply to all Samsung 2010 Blu-ray players and connected TVs implementing Samsung Apps. Most of the Samsung TVs released in 2010 support Samsung Apps and all of Samsung’s new Blu-ray players including BD-C8000, BD-C7900, BD-C6900, BD-C6800,  BD-C5900, BD-C7500, BD-C6500 and BD-C5500.

2. Samsung BD-C7500 Unpacking and Design

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LG BX580 is the company’s first 3D player and is available now on Amazon for $399 (although the waiting time seems to be 1 to 2 months). No review yet, but soon to come. Packed with goodies like 3D support, integrated Wi-Fi connectivity, NetCast (for Youtube, Flickr, Weather, NETFLIX, VUDU and so on), DLNA so you can play your DIVX, MKV, photos and music from your home server), despite the steep price, is guaranteed to be a winner.

Hit after the break for full technical details including codec support. Read More…

Let’s start by explaining what the DVD Region codes are, and why you would need (or not) a region free DVD Player.

DVD Region Codes are a a type of DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology created by Motion Picture Studios to control the release date, price, content for various geographic regions. Although is not mandatory, the DVDs can be encoded with one region code and it will only play on the DVD players sold in that specific region. While this capability might help the big studios to discriminate based on price/content/release date, it makes it harder for us to play imported DVDs that are just not released in our particular country, or, if you are an immigrant, the DVDs from your native country. Read More…

In case you haven’t heard, Blu-ray won the format war and the prices are finally at the level where everybody should be able to afford them. Streaming movies becomes increasingly popular and the mighty NETFLIX appears on more and more connected devices. Today, we will take a look at the latest and greatest mainstream connected Blu-ray players from major manufacturers as LG, Samsung, Panasonic and Sony.

Before going into details, we’ll talk a little bit more about what a connected device is and what you need to take full advantage of its full functionality.

As more and more entertainment Internet services started to get popular, and I am talking about movie/music streaming and pictures, a lot of people figured it out that it makes a lot of sense if they somehow can be integrated in the home theater systems. At the beginning, the most technologically gifted consumers used HTPC (and they still do) but having a PC in the living room is not for everybody. A lot of media streaming doesn’t require a lot of tinkering and configurations so the big electronics manufacturers  looked to embed various clients into their connected Blu-ray players or TV lines. The first big company to push for such clients was, you guessed, NETFLIX. The first NETFLIX set-top-box was provided by Roku, and made history, but Read More…