Mar 18 Podcast #470: Samsung BD-D6500 Blu-ray player
There’s a lot of talk about streaming movies eventually taking over for conventional disc based media like DVD and Blu-ray. But we all know the quality just isn’t quite there yet to eliminate Blu-ray entirely. So what are you to do? Why not buy a Blu-ray player that also streams movies so you’re covered for both cases? If it also supports 3D, you’re triple covered. That’s what you get with the Samsung BD-D6500.
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Today's Show:
Blu-ray Reviews:
News:
- Sears Cites Top-Three TV Trends
- Nielsen: Dramatic Rise In Time-Shifted Viewing
- NPD: Netflix at 61% of digital video services, Apple just 4%
- Time Warner launches TV-viewing app for iPad
- Welcome to IPTVConnection.com!\
- HP's WebOS target: 100 million devices
Other:
Samsung BD-D6500 Blu-ray player
There’s a lot of talk about streaming movies eventually taking over for conventional disc based media like DVD and Blu-ray. But we all know the quality just isn’t quite there yet to eliminate Blu-ray entirely. So what are you to do? Why not buy a Blu-ray player that also streams movies so you’re covered for both cases? If it also supports 3D, you’re triple covered. That’s what you get with the Samsung BD-D6500.
Features
- Enjoy 3D entertainment in your living room or upconvert regular 2D programming to 3D quality
- Connect to Samsung "Smart TV" Internet TV services for streaming media, social networking, and more
- Enjoy music, video, and photo files from both USB and networked DLNA-certified devices
- Built-in Wi-Fi for a wireless network connection without the hassle of cabling
- High-definition audio with Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS Master Audio, 7.1-channel output
- Retail price: $229, Street price: $210 (buy now)
Setup
The BD-D6500 is relatively straight forward to setup. You plug it in, connect HDMI and you’re all set for Blu-ray and 3D. You can plug in a wired Ethernet connection for the Internet apps, which is what we did, or you can configure the built-in WiFi. We were able to get the player on our WiFi network pretty easily, but didn’t use it that way because we primarily use the apps for streaming movies, so we wanted a reliable high-speed connection.
Performance
Video quality from the Samsung is excellent. Watching DVDs and Blu-rays looks beautiful. While we won’t try to compare it to the OPPO we recently reviewed, it does an excellent job with video and looks very, very good, and at a very reasonable price. The BD-D6500 also has decoders for Dolby True HD and DTS HD Master Audio, so if your receiver doesn’t support those formats, you’ll still get the full quality of the audio using PCM. As a straight-up Blu-ray player, it works quite well.
3D is, well ... 3D. You pretty much know where we stand on that. When you can get your hands on one of the few 3D titles available, you can use this player to watch it in all of the three dimensional splendor you can take. Your mileage will vary based on the 3D TV you play it back on, but you’ll get what you’re expecting. This feature is really more for future-proofing yourself than anything else. So you’ve got that going for you.
Connectivity is great. The Samsung apps give you access to everything you want, like Netflix, Vudu, Blockbuster, and everything you don’t want as well. You can even play games like Sudoku, which is useless. The apps all work as expected. The Netflix interface is as good as the PS3 and the video playback is great. The player also features DLNA but we couldn’t get it to work; couldn’t get it to stream a single title. For media playback from the local network, it was an epic failure.
Other than DLNA, which we didn’t see as a core feature of the player, the one area that really got to us the most is how slow and sluggish the player seems to be. It feels like it takes hours to load up, days to launch one of the apps from the main screen and weeks if you want to get into the full list of available apps. By the time you finally get to watch something, the BD-D6500 sure makes you feel like you’ve earned it. It does feel a bit quicker than the older Samsung BD-C6600, but it still seems too slow.
Note on Reliability
Samsung Blu-ray players have been beat up by users at review sites like Amazon and CNET over reliability issues. Although in general we really like this player, we felt the reliability issues needed to be called out. Braden owns two Samsung Blu-ray players and both work flawlessly and have been without incident. But before you buy, keep in mind that it may be a bit more of a crap shoot than other brands, so make sure you can return it if you get one of the bad ones.
Conclusion
The Samsung BD-D6500 has all the features you need to play video in your home theater, all packed into a neat, relatively inexpensive little package. Video playback is great, connectivity and app availability is really good and overall we liked it. We wish the DLNA would have worked and that it could have been a bit snappier. Overall we’d probably give it a solid B.
Reader Comments (2)
Wow, you don't think the Nielsen ratings are skewed?
"Nielsen says as a result of DVR usage, the average U.S. TV viewer watched 154 hours per month of television -- an 18-minute gain over the same period a year ago."
"which includes the slower live TV usage, the average U.S. TV viewer watched 145 hours -- a 90-minute gain over the same period a year ago"
Interesting, a gain is because people have DVRs in their home or are just plain ol' watching more TV? It couldn't have anything to do with the national unemployment rate? People spending more time at home.
Now I will be the first one to agree, I can watch more programming with a DVR because I can skip commercials but, I don't believe these results are accurate. Nielsen says, "For those 25-34 years old who have DVRs in their homes, time shifts encompassed 22% of all their TV viewing"
I know in my home, time shifts encompass about 90% of my TV viewing. In addition, my parents (in the 50-64 age range) viewing encompasses about 65% of their television programming.
Users are becoming more reliant on "on demand" viewing. Be that, DVR, Netflix, VOD, internet video...etc.
Until Nielsen can individually assess ALL the devices used for television viewing in the home, their results will not be accurate.
Guys- I enjoy your show every week, but I do not understand your emphasis on how soon you can see new release movies on DVD or via streaming. Maybe because I do not live in L.A. :). If I am dying to see a new release movie, like just before the oscars, I go to the theatre. For everything else it just goes into our Netflix queue and we watch it FIFO. This way is kind of amusing because by the time a movie shows up at home it's been a year since I put it into the Netflix queue so I don't always remember why I put it there. But for the rest of new movies what I would really like is a database of releases for the year so that I don't miss something. If you have a good reference it would be great to share it.
thank you.
dan