Samsung BD-C5300 Blu-Ray Player Wi-Fi Ready with 6 free titles

theredman86

at 2:22 pm

If you are buying this product for the screen fit feature which supposedly converts 21:9 to 16:9 then don’t bother!!…it simply does not work…it seems to simply just zoom in to try and create a full screen feel, however lots of the picture content is lost round the edges, i was very excited about this feature, however it does not do anything like what the samsung website says (take a look at the racing car pictures to show how they advertise it!!)…they do not show any picture loss whatsoever
Rating: 3 / 5

C. Ring

at 3:59 pm

Ok, first up let me say that I will be breaking this review into 2 parts, firstly the player and then Blu-ray.

Before buying this player I went to several Highstreet stores and got them to Demo various players, mainly the Sony DBP-S360, the Sony BDP-S560 and the Samsung BD-P1620 and the Phillips BDP-3000.

Having looked at the loading times and the menu’s I ruled out the Sony players immediately, they use a menu system called the cross media bar, and in a word it is “Crap”. The players take about 30-45 seconds to load, have virtually no features they cannot play DivX movies etc and during the playing of discs you get “Black screens” coming up during loading with no idea of how long the moveie/screen will take. Of the remaining players the Samsung and Phillips were fairly close though when I found the Samsung BD-C5300 on offer with 6 movies that won hands down.

Background:

I initially 4 years ago invested in the HD DVD product from Toshiba as at the time, HD DVD was a finished standard and the “Hi-Def” war was at it’s height, value for money HD DVD beat bluray hands down.

I still own 2 HD DVD Players which are both Region free for HD DVD Disc and standard DVD, as a product they have been 2 of the best DVD players I have ever owned.

In the end, HD DVD lost the Hi-def War purely due to corporate pressure and backroom dealings from Sony, the consumer on this occasion was ruled out of the equation and Sony signed exclusivity deals with 5 of the 7 major movie studios including Disney to block Movies from being released on the HD DVD format. Sony also had realeased figures that bluray was outselling HD DVD by about 3-1 in stand alone players, though some believed Sony were including PS3’s as stand alone players. This coupled with the restraint on content meant that Toshiba was in a no-win situation and eventually succumbed to Sony’s pressure. The consumer definately lost out as we never really got to vote on which format was better with our wallets.

Strangely a year after HD DVD went through, a survey of over 100,000 North American homes found that there were almost 2-1 HD DVD players in peoples homes compared with Stand alone Blu-ray, which kind of shows Sony will spout any figure it can manipulate to make people think the uptake is better than it is.

The player:

Having invested in HD DVD previously and knowing the back ground of blu-ray I decided to wait until a) the cost of the players had come down to an acceptable price level (£100 mark) and the profile 2.0 being finalised and players being released with this installed as standard and not requiring updates to get to it.

I bought this player on special offer as it included 6 Blu-ray Movies in the box (yay me). Samsung are at the forefront nowadays with technology and all their electronics goods are superbly built. The player itself is very small, measuring only 6″ deep by about 15″ long by about 1″ high, the device is a 2.0 profile player, which means you can use all the DB live feaures etc.

The Player is “Wifi Ready” which means if you buy the Wifi adapter (also known as Dongle) then you can connect wirelessly to your broadband to run updates and access the BD live content.

This player boots up quite quickly, 30 seconds or so and the menu is graphical and far superior to the Sony Cross Media Bar, and the player can play DivX movies and browse Pictures and play music stored on USB.

Feature wise this player has about all the features you could want in a Blu-ray player, it also for the techies, has Deep colour, HDMI 1.3 Dolby digital etc.

As a player I would rate this 5 stars and value for Money 4 stars however it is let down by the blu-ray format itself.

Blu-ray:

When Bluray was released it was not a finished standard and competed against the “Finalised” “HD-DVD” standard which was created and backed by the DVD consortium, Sony broke away from the consortium as they wished to control the “HD format” by creating their own proprietry Hi-def standard, Blu-ray Disc. The consortium beleived that no one company should control a standard and so Sony went their own way.

Sony signed exclusivity deals with 5 of the 7 major movie studios to stop the content from being released on the HD DVD Format and so eventually starved the format of titles.

Bluray has had several revisions, the main issue caused by this is that people who bought profile 1.0 players could not play discs created in profile 1.1 and 1.1 players could not play profile 1.2 discs etc. Profile 2.0 is the final revision and allows the use of BD live content.

Having waited almost 2 and a half years for Blu-ray to settle in, I thought when I bought bluray it would be far superior to HD DVD, I was totally wrong, bluray now is nowhere near where HD DVD 3 years ago. I feel robbed!

Firstly the menu system on the bluray movies is no better than a standard DVD, yes some titles have a “picture in Picture” menu where you can still see the movie playing in a little window on the screen but that is about it. As for content the content is no better than standard DVD, for the fact bluray raves about having 50gb of space per disk the extra content supplied is totally rubbish.

The interactive menu’s are no where near as good as the HD DVD interactive menu’s and the scene selection is pretty much the same as a standard DVD setup.

The biggest and most annoying gripe is that blu-ray disc is region encoded along with the standard DVD being region encoded on the player. As far as I can tell there are no firmware hacks or hardware hacks that will alow you play region 1 DVD’s or Region A bluray discs on the player, which totally sucks.

I tend to buy Region 1 DVD’s because some of the movies, TV series and Music video titles I want to get hold of are not for sale in the UK! fortunately I have a HD DVD player which is totally region free! for HD content and standard DVD content as well and is the best DVD upscaler I have found.

So after 2 and a half years wait, I find I made the right choice in the first place when I bought “HD-DVD”.

Blu-ray is now the defactor standard for HD content, but I would say that I will probably still by DVD as first choice, then Download content from Xbox Live to watch HD movies and only as as 3rd choice if I really want a movie to keep and I want to pay the “premium” (namely the extorionate cost) of buying it in HD to own, then I will buy it on Blu-ray.

So the long and short of it I give bluray 1 star purely because you can watch a movie in 1080P.

I would like to thank Sony especially for ruining the consumers choice and right to buy the better standard and for royally screwing up the next gen HD Format. Way to go Sony and corporate greed!

Rating: 3 / 5