With ever-dropping prices, increased competition and the ubiquity of internet streaming features, Blu-ray players are quickly becoming a commodity. As the feature and performance gaps among players close, some manufacturers are setting themselves apart from the others with unique styling. Samsung is one of these manufacturers and their BD-D6700 Blu-ray 3D player stands out if for nothing other than its bold industrial design.
Case in point, it took me literally over a minute to figure out why nothing happened when I pressed the touch-sensitive LCD eject control on the front panel. The disc tray would not open because there is no disc tray ("there is no spoon..."). Instead the sleek sliver-topped black box sports a barely visible disc-loading slot in its lower mid-section. And in place of any physical buttons, we get the afore-mentioned touch-sensitive LCD panel which illuminates the basic functions such as play, stop and eject. It's easy enough to get used to, just a bit of a jarring experience when you're used to players behaving (and looking) a certain way. If you're in search of a player that sets itself apart visually, Samsung has got you covered. And as for what's under this sleek and shiny hood, we'll get to that.
The Set-Up
Setting up the player is a standard affair. While there are component and composite video outputs, you'll be best served using one of the HDMI outputs to connect this to your TV as it's the only way you'll get 1080p or 3D output. The player offers dual HDMI outputs so you can connect it to dual displays or use it with an early HDMI-capable home theater receiver that lacks 3D-passthrough support. In this case, connect the "main" HDMI output to your display, and the "sub" HDMI output to your receiver so you can take full advantage of the lossless soundtracks available on Blu-ray Disc.
If you're planning to take advantage of BD-Live, internet streaming apps and/or DLNA home networking, you'll need to set up the network too. The player includes integrated WiFi (wireless networking) up to 802.11n, as well as wired networking via the standard RJ45 network port. Both of these connections worked for me in their fully automatic modes, with the router assigning IP address, gateway, DNS, etc. However, when I moved the player to a new location (with a different router), the player failed to find any of the wireless routers in the area. A quick chat with our Samsung contact and some exploratory surgery by me on the player led to the discovery that the internal wireless networking module had somehow become disconnected. I reseated the thin connecting cable on the WiFi module inside the player and was back in business. Don't try this at home as it may void your warranty.
The only other odd behavior I noticed during the review period was that a firmware upgrade (version 0102 to 0104) that I performed via the internet connection wiped out all of the user settings on the player (digital output settings, SmartHub settings, etc.). This only occurred once and is not expected behavior. Also the unit had trouble playing one DVD ("Heidi") which played fine on an older Panasonic player. But honestly, this library rental disc looked pretty low budget, so I wouldn't knock too many points of the player's score for this. Occasionally the player would also get stuck or exhibit minor glitches on discs that were lightly scratched or dirty, but in most cases a few wipes of the disc with a cotton cloth would restore normal playback.
So Happy I Could Just Stream!
The BD-D6700 offers a fairly extensive selection of streaming apps -- a subset of Samsung's "Smart Hub" suite of internet streaming providers and apps that we find on their TVs. Netflix, Pandora, Hulu Plus, YouTube and VUDU are here (among many others) but Samsung's "Explore 3DTV" app is not available on the players. For that you'll need to pony up for one of Samsung's Smart TVs.
Samsung handles enabling some of these streaming services differently than other manufacturers. For example, to use Pandora I had to visit the Pandora web site and enter an activation code instead of just entering my Pandora e-mail account and password on the player. You can create a Samsung "Smart TV" account on the Blu-ray player and then enter your Pandora account there, but this means using the awkward numeric keypad to enter in all the information twice (once for Smart TV and again for Pandora), and that ain't fun. It doesn't help that my e-mail address is 28 characters long but I have no one but myself to blame for that.
What is fun is exploring the streaming apps. VUDU works well, with not only full HDX (1080p) support and Dolby Digital Plus surround sound, but also support for 3D titles. Samsung is one very few manufacturers that supports VUDU's 3D collection and a quick preview of a few of these looked sweet on a Samsung D8000 LED TV. The 3D version of Drive Angry on VUDU looked almost as good as the Blu-ray 3D. But keep in mind that you do need a high bandwidth internet connection (over 5 MBPS download) in order to view HDX or 3D content on VUDU without buffering. Netflix also works well, offering the upgraded user interface (3.0) so you can browse new titles and search, not just view selections from your instant queue. This particular version of the Netflix app does not support Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 output from Netflix titles: it's strictly a 2-channel affair.
We did notice an occasional problem in Netflix streaming, similar to what we saw on Panasonic's DMP-BDT310: black frames in the stream. From what we can tell, this occurs when the network bandwidth to the Netflix streaming server increases or decreases and the Netflix app optimizes itself for the available bandwidth. While streaming the movie Kick Ass in HD, the black frame popped up 7 or 8 times during the length of the movie. It only lasts a split second but it does happen and can be a minor annoyance. Also, at one point, when watching "Walking Dead" on Netflix, the unit had to re-buffer a few times and eventually just froze and became unresponsive. The only resolution here was to power the unit on and off.
More Codecs Than You Can Stick a Shake At
On the audio side of things, the BD-D6700 supports all of the various codecs you'll find on CD, DVDs or Blu-ray Discs: Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS, DTS-HD Master Audio, multi-channel PCM: the gang's all here. But the Samsung player handles these codecs better than most players in terms of its output flexibility. You can choose to output these audio codecs in their native bitstream format, for decoding on an HDMI-capable receiver, or you can decode them internally to multi-channel PCM (HDMI) or two channel PCM (fiberoptic out) or two-channel analog (RCA jacks). But that's common enough.
What the Samsung player also offers is the ability to re-encode these formats to standard DTS or Dolby Digital surround. Why does this matter? If you have an older receiver or a soundbar or HTiB system that only supports Dolby Digital decoding, or if you are trying to pass a surround sound signal through your TV to its fiberoptic digital output, the Dolby Digital re-encode option is very handy. With this option you can get 5.1 channel Dolby Digital sound, whether the original source is multi-channel PCM, Dolby Digital, Dolby TrueHD, DTS or DTS-HD. I wish more players had this option as it would make configuration of the player with more modest receivers or soundbars a far simpler affair.
1, 2, 3: Go!
Anyone who owns a first or second generation Blu-ray player knows how long it can take to load a disc. But as with any technology, things get better -- and faster -- with each generation. The Samsung BD-D6700 is no exception. In fact, it's one of the fastest players we have tested to date. Starting with the unit powered on, slipping a disc into the slot, we were able to see the Universal menu on a standard DVD (Gladiator) in a brisk 11 seconds. A plain old first generation Blu-ray Disc (Hitch) loaded to the Sony Pictures logo in 13 seconds, and a BD-Java Blu-ray title (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) got past the spinning gold coins to the Disney logo in just 24 seconds. For 3D content, we clocked Sony's "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" Blu-ray 3D at 42 seconds until it loadedthe Sony Pictures' logo.
I thought perhaps I could trip it up with the BD-Live-heavy Inglourious Basterds, known to bring many a player to its knees, but even this normally sluggish title loaded to the first disc-resident content -- an ad for Universal's PocketBlu app -- in just about a minute. If you eliminate the network connection (thereby preventing the BD-Live content from loading), you can get to the disc menu in just 37 seconds. This is the best performance we've seen on this disc, beating out some competitive players by a fair margin.
"Control, Control, You Must Learn Control!"
But the best part of the remote app is that when you access functions that require keyboard input, such as "search" in Smart Hub, you get to use the device's keyboard to enter information. This is much easier than using the numeric keypad on the remote for data entry. Kudos to Samsung for that, as this is a very nice feature when it comes time to enter userids/passwords or phrases for the search engine.
Testing, Testing.
After speed testing, and playing with the remotes, we took a look at the unit's video processing performance. Most Blu-ray players can produce a nice image on a standard 1080p/24 Blu-ray Disc, but it's how the player handles standard definition or interlaced content that sets it apart. On the HQV Benchmark test DVD, the player performed well on the jaggies tests which test a player's ability to handle diagonal lines. On the film cadence test (an extract from Super Speedway), the player took nearly a second to detect the inherent 2:3 film cadence, so there was some moiré distortion in the grandstands, but it was banished quickly enough.
On the mixed cadence test -- a film-based source with title overlaid in video format -- the player was a little slow to recognize this type of content, which led to some tearing in the text as it scrolled from the bottom to the top of the screen. But eventually it did catch on and cleaned up its act.
On the noise reduction tests, the player did well enough removing simulated broadcast and mosquito noise. I don't weigh these tests too heavily in rating a Blu-ray player's performance as this is more important in a display device that processes and displays a lot of standard def or compressed content. Similarly, the player performed well, with limited jaggies and artifacts in the oddball cadence tests that are included on the HQV test disc. But these cadence tests represent a small amount of real world content.
Turning to HD tests, the video detail and film details tests on the HQV HD benchmark looked pretty good. There was some shimmer in the film detail test, as well as mild moiré in the seats of the football stadium, but this would only affect the player's ability to decode film-based (24 frames/second) material encoded into a 1080i video stream -- something that really doesn't happen too much on actual Blu-ray Discs or streaming sources.
Send in the Local Media
In addition to internet streaming, the BD-D6700 also supports DLNA as well as local media file playback from an attached USB drive. It does this much better than some of its competitors (namely the current generation Panasonic Blu-ray players), in that it supports most popular audio and video codecs. I hit it with MKV files, Divx and Xvid-encoded AVI files, MPEG videos and it handled most of these without many hiccups. DLNA is a little more limited that local playback from a USB stick, but it still behaved more reliably than the afore-mentioned Panasonic players at accessing and streaming video, audio and images from a locally networked Windows 7 PC.
For photos, music and videos you can browse by folder, and for music and videos you can also browse by meta data such as album or artist name (if available). The music player for DLNA and USB content is fairly basic. It has a place for album art but no album art displayed on any of my MP3s. When viewing a photo, you can adjust the zoom or slideshow settings by hitting the "Tools" button. A couple of times when I was browsing a large library of images from a networked PC, the "Loading" icon froze up and the unit itself hung. At that point, the only way to recover was to power down the player. But overall, the multimedia capabilities are the player are fairly stable and comprehensive.
Shiny Silver High Def Discs
Although it's easy to get distracted by all the extra features, when it comes down to it, this is a Blu-ray Disc player. You wouldn't buy it unless you want to play Blu-ray Discs, and perhaps Blu-ray 3D Dsics. Most Blu-ray players these days handle playback of Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D content well and the BD-D6700 is no exception here. Hitting it with a number of different 2D Blu-ray Discs, including recent titles such as "Drive Angry," "The Social Network," "Limitless," and "Hanna," the player produced crisp, detailed images with excellent color saturation and no noticeable artifacts. Sound was also well reproduced. The player works fine with a TV's built-in speakers but we'd highly recommend using it with a fully discrete surround sound system, preferably one with HDMI inputs and support for the lossless high definition audio codecs, to really exploit its audio capabilities. It doesn't offer a lot of tweaks or options to the sound, like the Panasonic players do, but most people probably won't miss them.
On 3D content, the unit also proved itself a reliable performer. Although "Avatar" is still a Panasonic exclusive on Blu-ray 3D (until next year), it played perfectly fine on the Samsung player, with a deep crosstalk-free image. The early cryo wake-up scene seemed to extend fifty feet beyond my home theater's walls. And on Samsung's own exclusive content (currently most of the Dreamworks Animation catalog), the player also performed extremely well. "Shrek 4" and "How to Train Your Dragon" both presented a detailed and natural looking 3D image when played back on the BD-D6700 through a Samsung D8000 LED TV. You may never, or rarely, use the 3D capabilities of this player in day to day operation, but it's there if you need it.
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Final Thoughts
For those on the lookout for a fast Blu-ray Player with strong performance and a good selection of streaming apps, Samsung's BD-D6700 is worth a close look. The unique design makes it stand out from the boring black boxes of the competition and the extensive feature set is hard to beat. At $299 MSRP ($220 street price), it is a bit pricier than competitive models, but if you need the second HDMI output for compatibility with a pre-3D HDMI receiver and like the ability to playback media from a local network, the BD-D6700 is an excellent choice.
Product Highlights (Samsung BD-D6700):
Manufacturer's Contact Information:
Samsung U.S.A. 85 Challenger Road Ridgefield Park, New Jersey 07660ph: 800-SAMSUNG (726-7864)
on the Web: www.samsung.com
Where to Buy:
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