Hands-on with Samsung's BD-P2500 Blu-ray player

At $300 and up, the P2500 is far from cheap, but it packs in solid Blu-ray performance, BD Live support, and—best of all—Netflix video streaming, now in HD. I've been giving the P2500 a spin for the past week, and so far, I'm liking what I'm seeing (and hearing). But is it worth the cash?

OK, let's just skip to the good stuff—yes, Blu-ray discs look great on the P2500. I watched a variety of test discs—including "The Dark Knight," "Transformers," the new "Indiana Jones" movie, and "Iron Man"—at full 1080p resolution (and at 24 frames/second) on my 46-inch Sony Bravia LCD HDTV, and all looked razor-sharp to my eyes, especially the IMAX sequences on TDK.

Blu-ray load times were fair, if a bit on the slow side. First, I tried "Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull," a non-BD-Live disc (and thus, no features to download via Ethernet). When starting the movie with the player in stand-by mode, it took more than a minute for the Paramount logo to appear; with the deck up and running, start-up time dropped to just 12 seconds—much better.

Then I switched to the BD-Live-enabled "The Dark Knight"; with the player on, it took the P2500 more than 30 seconds to get to the intial copyright splash screen, compared to 22 seconds on my Blu-ray-equipped PlayStation 3. Next, I tried "Iron Man," a notoriously tricky BD-Live disc; the P2500 took about 2-3 minutes for the initial BD Live download over Ethernet, although the startup time dropped to about 52 seconds on subsequent tries (compared to 42 seconds on the PS3). Overall? Not the fastest load times I've ever seen, but still acceptable.

Another crucial test: 1080p DVD upscaling. For my tests, I used my Superbit version of "Lawrence of Arabia," and the sweeping sand dunes, big blue skies, and the (occassionally) galloping camels looked great (colors appeared a bit "floaty" at first, but settled down once I switched "DVD Noise Reduction" to "off" in the HDMI settings menu). I did notice some slight moiré patterns in the vertical stitching on Gasim's vest—not a huge deal (I saw the same thing while testing on my PlayStation 3, but not on my Oppo upscaling DVD deck)—but still, worth noting. Meanwhile, the tricky, jaggy-prone haystacks and bridges at the beginning of "Star Trek: Insurrection"—a key test of a player's 3:2 pull-down abilities—looked perfectly smooth.

Of course, one of the main draws of the P2500 is its streaming Netflix video player (the LG BD300 Blu-ray deck has one as well), and so far, so good. The player lets you browse your Netflix streaming queue, rate and remove (although not browse) movies, and SD streaming quality looked fair, if pretty soft—in other words, par for the course. I wasn't able to test HD streaming (my P2500 test unit was synced to someone else's Netflix queue, which lacked HD movies), but user reports on the Web have been positive.

[Note: Best Buy has it's own version of the P2500—it's the P2550—that also comes with streaming Pandora radio. Pretty cool, but you can only get the P2550 at Best Buy, which is now selling the deck for $349—or about $30 to $50 more than the P2500 on other online retailers.]

The P2500 handles most of the main digital audio formats (Dolby Digital, DTS, etc.) and decodes lossless Dolby TrueHD soundtracks; unfortunately for audiphiles, there's no on-board decoding for DTS-HD Master Audio. (Samsung promised a DTS-HD MA firmware update for the P2500 before the year is up, but so far, no dice.)

So, the big question: Is the P2500 worth the cash? At $399 retail or $299 online, there's no question that the deck is a pricey proposition; as I've blogged earlier this month, the cheapest Blu-ray players are now selling for $200 or less.

My opinion: If you're not interested in streaming Netflix movies or you don't care about Net-connected BD-Live features, stick with a bargain player. But if you're dying to stream Netflix movies at home and you don't already have the $99 Roku player or an Xbox 360, then the P2500's $299-$399 price tag starts to look more sensible.