Maybe it's just me, but I feel that Blu-ray still has some excitement left in it. Watching a movie in gorgeous 1080p/24 still has a sort of "event" feel to it, particuarly when you blow it up on a nice projection screen with killer surround sound. With all the other ways to get crappy HD (cable/satellite/iTunes etc), something about putting in the disc and watching a pristine film is special.
So why does every Blu-ray player look like a warmed-over DVD player? Well, almost every Blu-ray player.
The Samsung BD-C7900 makes a go of it with all sorts of flashy blue-ish white lights. The top of the player has a half-moon opening to the spinning disc below, lit with blue-white LEDs. There are no "buttons" per-se, instead touch sensitive areas that are lit from underneath with the logos of what they do (power, eject, play and so on).
I know the aesthetics of a player aren't of the highest priority when looking to buy, but the extra thought put into the design of the 7900 is welcome in a sea of boring black boxes.
Gooey
The prettiness continues after you turn it on in the form of an excellent Graphical User Interface (GUI). It's a commendably slick ten foot interface. Big colorful icons scream "big money." It's even better than Sony's excellent, but rather spartan, XMB.
What's more impressive than the money Samsung spent creating the gorgeous GUI is the sheer amount of streaming content available. There's Netflix, of course, but also VUDU, CinemaNow, Blockbuster, Hulu Plus, YouTube, Pandora, and more. There's countless more available on "Samsung Apps" which is just as it sounds, an App store for Samsung. Most of the big programs, like those listed here, are free. There are also games and other content that costs $0.99 or more. It's a little slow to navigate, but not annoyingly so.
The Netflix interface is of the latest gen variety, a rarity in Blu-ray players. You can search for titles, which right there you've got better functionality than nearly every other Blu-ray player. There's no chroma upsampling error (the "Chroma Bug") with Netflix content, which we saw in the latest Panasonic Blu-ray 3D players. Detail created when scaling up SD content from Netflix is good, though not quite as good as the Toshiba BDX2500.
I didn't try out many of the non-video apps. I did try out Google Maps, using it a lot myself on my phone and computer. Sadly, it was exceedingly sluggish and annoyingly difficult to enter an address using the remote control. The novelty of Google Maps on a big screen is neat, but you'll never use this to actually look for something.
Speaking of the remote, I liked the look of it, all big buttony. But in the dark it's hard to use; all the buttons seem to be the same size. Only the playback buttons glow in the dark and the arrow buttons aren't on a rocker like most remotes, instead being square and similar to the buttons around it. Not great.
Let's Get Physical
Using the Spears and Munsil Benchmark Blu-ray, the BD-C7900 picks up the 3:2 sequence with 1080i and correctly deinterlaces it, showing that the player has no problem decoding film-based sources properly. With the rotating bar test pattern on this disc, there were only very small jaggies as the bar neared horizontal, within the green area. This is quite good. The HD Ship clip showed very small jaggies on the nearly-horizontal rigging.
With the Standard Def Bridge clip, the performance was similar. There were small jaggies on the cables on the bridge. The small size of the jaggies was consistent regardless of the angle, which in some ways is better than jaggies that change size when the angle gets worse.
For SD, I put in the HQV Benchmark DVD. Performance here was pretty consistent with what I found on the Spears and Munsil disc. There were minimal small jaggies on the rotating bar pattern. There was a slight momentary increase around 20 degrees, and again at 5, but overall performance was quite good.
The waving flag pattern on this disc was nearly perfect. The flag itself had no noticeable jaggies, which is excellent, though there was some noise in the bricks on the building in the background.
As expected, the BD-C7900 picks up 3:2 cadence with 480i material and deinterlaces without incident. Again, as with the HD film cadence test, this shows that the player will have no problem decoding 24 frame/second film-sourced material from DVD, which is most of what's out there.
Using the Gladiator DVD, namely the end of chapter 12, there are almost no jaggies on the roofs as the "camera" pans over ancient Rome. There was some noise in the rooftops, a similar artifact as the noise in the bricks on the HQV waving flag test.
A similar story is told by The Fifth Element on DVD, which had some small jaggies, but overall performance is good. There's a decent amount of detail created in the upconversion process, though not quite as much as some other players. The image was a little noiser than other players, though. As in, it seemed like there was a little more grain in the image than with other players.
All told, the performance across the board was very good. It's not the best I've seen in any one category, but it's consistently a solid B+/A-.
Boot me
DDD
The BD-C7900 should auto-detect your 3D TV and output 3D from discs so encoded. For some reason the first time I plugged it into a Panasonic TC-50VT25 it only output 2D and the 3D option in the menu was grayed out. Unplug, and plug it all in again, and it worked fine. Gotta love HDMI. Wait, no, the opposite of that.
Using Coraline the BD-C7900 showed no difficulty creating the depth axis in this movie. An excellent demo is about 1 minute, 50 seconds into the film. A needle pokes through the sack person, piercing out of the screen. This whole scene is a mix of depth and close field, with the credits that overlay the opening set more or less in the plane of the TV, and the various drawers, metal hands, and so on at a variety of levels of depth. All look good.
I watched Date Night on Blu-ray mostly to see if it would have any problems (it didn't). This is a good looking disc too, though. The scene where our hero and heroine are escaping in the conveniently placed Audi R8 and smash into an inconveniently placed cab looked especially good. There was detail in the faces and the cars, vivid colors of the lights illuminating the street and sidewalk, and excellent shadow detail in dark car interiors and the slick black streets.
Turn-Ons:
Turn-Offs:
Final Thoughts
Samsung's BD-C7900 does just about everything right, and it does so in a way that you have to question how other manufacturers are doing it. With so many choices for content, the beauty and ease of use of the interface, to the above average performance, it's hard to see why someone would chose a different player.
Oh, right, the cost. That would be a good reason. With a list price of $400, the BD-C7900 is one of the more expensive of the mainstream BD players. The Toshiba BDX2500, for example, is about half the price. You get slightly better performance on the Toshiba, but at the expense of 3D and most of the streaming content. Something like the Panasonic DMP-BDT100 offers slightly better performance (except on standard def Netflix streaming), 3D, but again vastly fewer choices in streaming and less flexible installation options.
So maybe $400 isn't such a bad deal. Especially considering Samsung got just about everything right.
So that's how you do that...
Features and Specifications
Connectivity:
Company Contact Information
Samsung Electronics America, Inc.
105 Challenger Road
Ridgefield Park, NJ 07660
ph: 800-SAMSUNG
Website: www.samsung.com
Where to Buy:
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