Samsung Blu-Ray Player in the House - A Poor Investment?

[Sanji Himura]

My father claims to be technologically adept. A case in point is that he bought a Samsung home theater system 18 months ago that came with a separate Blu-Ray player so that he could watch movies on his 60" flat screen(TV brand is irrelevant to this topic) in HD. At the time, I embraced the decision because he decided to get rid of his clunker of a CRT TV, even after spending a bit of money on a WiFi card that was compatible with the player to get updates to software.

After doing a little homework recently, I have come to regret the decision. While I am convinced that this was a shill to use the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, I don't think that it doesn't make the following statement anymore true. I have read that:

One of the biggest problems Blu-ray has had is it is a "living format", unlike the set-in-stone HD-DVD and DVD formats. So the standard has had several upgrades, and these upgrades have largely required firmware updates. Also, some player makers out there (I'm looking at you, Samsung) have released defective players that don't implement certain features correctly, meaning that they won't play certain discs at all. Since the PS3 is one of the only Blu-ray players with updatable firmware, and defects can be quickly fixed, then it will play all past, present, and future Blu-ray releases.

Also:

In order to save money on production, a lot of stand-alone third-party Blu-ray disc players rely on very cheap CPUs that would have been blazing fast in 1992, but are super-slow today. As a result, they sometimes take several minutes to load Blu-ray discs that heavily rely on Java bytecode.

The PS3 doesn't have this problem, since its 3.2 GHz PPC64 CPU is insanely fast compared to the CPUs used in many stand-alone Blu-ray players. Thankfully, since this question was first answered years ago, the situation on stand-alone players has improved, and now even the cheap ones aren't so slow anymore.

Since the player was bought in the middle of 2010 at the earliest, should I worry about some of the things that I have quoted? If yes, should I make a stronger push to have my PS3 moved into the main living area to be used as a game console/Blu-Ray player?

 

[edawg456]

I was on the same boat as you. I wouldn't be worried at all. I moved my ps3 out of the office and put it in my family room. And sold the blu ray which was a piece of junk which my girlfriend bought.

 

[RX-7_FD3S]

I convince my father to buy a ps3 as blu-ray player and so that I could play when I go and visit them, I gave him a remote and now he's super happy with it, sold his dvd player.

And for your question you dont need to, I never heard of someone having trouble with a blu-ray player not reading a type of blu-ray unless it was a hardware problem. As for long loading time, I never heard of that problem so I can't help you there.

 

[Jondot]

Since the player was bought in the middle of 2010 at the earliest, should I worry about some of the things that I have quoted? If yes, should I make a stronger push to have my PS3 moved into the main living area to be used as a game console/Blu-Ray player?

Wouldn't neccesarily say that, and I hate Samsung with absolute devotion.

I don't think it's fair to say that an old Blu Ray player will, within a few years, be utterly useless. Even if this constant need for updates is true, I'm yet to come across one without an ethernet port of some use, so there's nothing to stop it getting a firmware upgrade one a month for the next millennia.

However, that's on the assumption that manufacturers will actually produce said updates. Samsung strike me as being particularly bad at it - the one I bought 2 years ago was put on sale with 'iPlayer & Lovefilm enabled' on the box before they'd worked out how to do it. Looks like they still haven't worked it out, going off a review on here. If British Leyland did AV equipment...

So yeah, that's one bonus of the PS3 - I imagine they'll be supporting it for a while yet. Though to be honest I wasn't aware any of this 'upgrade required' stuff was the case.

 

[Sanji Himura]

Well the reason why he even bought the wifi card in the first place is because the movie that he bought, Knight and Day, wouldn't play on the machine. I have become concerned that old Blu-Ray players will no longer be offered updates by their manufacturers simply due to their age and the internals that they used to make the player in the first place.

This is partially the reason why I fear that the player will be no good in six months to a year while the PS3 will just keep on going.

 

[TB]

Then keep the one you have and in six months to a year, if Samsung stops supporting it, then look into getting a new one or use the PS3. If it occasionally needs an update and is still working, I see no issue. No sense in worrying about what might happen.