Need a Blu-Ray player, but don’t want or need the gaming aspect of the Playstation 3? The Samsung BD-P3600 one of the highest rated non-PS3 Blu-Ray players on the market. The features on this player are a laundry list of what you will need to never leave your couch again. According to CNET (the holy grail of tech reviews) “The Samsung BD-P3600 is a huge leap ahead for standalone Blu-Ray players with blazing-fast operational speed, tons of features and excellent image quality.” Well let’s see if this player reaches its potential, or lags back like the rest of standalone players.
The player claims to boast a new innovative Video Quality Enhancement (QVE) feature that further improves the picture quality by adjusting brightness, flickering and other visual “noise”. While this sounds like an awesome feature it really only goes so far to improve video quality. This feature is clearly targeting videophiles but most videophiles have manually tweaked their settings anyways. This is not a mark down, but a heads up.
Besides the QVE this player really shines when you see all the options for viewing your media. First it has your Blu-Ray player, which benchmarks of the loading times met or came close to the industry leader, PS3. Next, it has a Netflix instant streaming player, which in term of performance works only slightly as well PS3’s Netflix player. It also has a Pandora player but it feels tacked on and load times are on the slow side. Finally, the player offers the ability to stream content from your pc. Once again the feature seems tacked on and is only there so Samsung can say “look what we did!”
I really wanted to like this player. It seems like for everything it does right, it does two things wrong. If you are in the market for a Blu-Ray player or you are looking to upgrade, get a ps3. Its really easy and it offers all the features of this player and much more, but it does it all much better.
Final Rating is a 6.5/10
