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In Reply to: RE: Just joined the Purple Club posted by Christine Tham on February 02, 2008 at 15:54:10
...and had accumulated over 80 HDs and a Toshiba XA1 and then XA2. After Christmas I decided I wanted to watch some movies that are exclusive to BD, so I started looking for a Samsung 5000. After continuous buying (my wife calls me Mr. Excess for good reason) and a little culling, I now have over 90 HDs and almost 40 BDs. Both types of discs work, look, and sound fine in my player. I prefer BD's higher-res audio codecs, but BDs take longer to start and move from section to section.
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Tin-eared audiofool and 1000-yard benchrest shootist.
http://community.webshots.com/user/jeffreybehr
Follow Ups:
I was pretty keen on it, but then all the problems (ie. no DTS MA decoding, no Profile 1.1) kind of turned me off.
I'm still kind of hoping Samsung will be able to fix the issues, but the fact that they are discontinuing the player in May has me worried.
I ended up going down the PC path, and bought the LG GGW-H20L "universal" reader and BD burner (I have over 2TB of recorded broadcast HDTV that I plan to burn once media prices come down). The latest version of PowerDVD no longer downsamples audio and is Profile 1.1 compliant. All in all, I spent less than US$500 (given I already have a PC for watching digital TV).
I prefer Blu-Ray for the higher capacity, but HD-DVD for lack of region coding. Even though Blu-Ray may or may not have won the format war, there's a few HD-DVD exclusive titles worth owning.
I love it so far. After a firmware update--a painless and quick process--it still won't play 'Sunshine', and it won't decode DD THD to the analog outputs*, but other than that, I'm happy. While I understand that many purchasers are quite frustrated with its inability to decode/send some high-rez sountracks along the digital-audio feed, I bought it to be able to see HDs and BDs with one machine while consuming only one set of my preamp's 6-channel inputs, and it does that very well.
BTW, I understand that the next update will make it 1.1-compliant; we'll see. :-)
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* which means it won't play 1.5% of the hi-def discs I own
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Tin-eared audiofool and 1000-yard benchrest shootist.
http://community.webshots.com/user/jeffreybehr
How's this:
Samsung builds shit products and you'll regret spending your money on their junk. Take it for what it's worth.
:-)
Notice the :-) as I don't want to give anyone the impression that I wasn't joking about their doorstops.
How nice of you to join the dialog...NOT.
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Tin-eared audiofool and 1000-yard benchrest shootist.
http://community.webshots.com/user/jeffreybehr
"Since I don't much like Sony products..." may not be as colorful as my post, but it's black&white just the same. Sony may not be everyone's favorite electronics company, but at least they invent: Samsung copies (and does a poor job at it most of the time).
By the way, "...and won't have issues like Samsung BD products." and "Samsung builds shit products and you'll regret spending your money on their junk." pretty much answers the question that was asked: "What do you think of the Samsung 5000?".
Panasonic will be releasing their BD50 by late Q1/Q2. It will be Profile 2.0, decode and bitstream the advanced audio codecs and won't have issues like Samsung BD products. It will probably be around $500. The only potential problem is that their current player (BD30) has a -5dB bug on the LFE/.1 channel when (native or decoded to) PCM is involved. If they get this issue worked out, the player will pretty much do anything you need.
The PS3 will be upgraded to Profile 2.0 very soon (technically it is right now, but the "official" upgrade is coming shortly). While there are no multichannel analog outputs, it will decode all of the audio codecs and send them as PCM over HDMI. The exception is DTS-HD Master Audio, but there's supposed to be a firmware upgrade on the way in Q2.
And by forcing me to go HDMI, it greatly reduced the spaghetti and expense of six interconnects at the rear panels of the front end and preamp. Are you sure that DTS HD MA compatibility is firmware-upgradable? I heard a rumor that it required some type of hardware (chip) upgrade, but I never know what to believe with so many lies floating around.
-------------"I have found that if you love life, life will love you back." -Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982)
There are some people who believe that the HDMI 1.3 chip in the PS3 will some day be able to bitstream the advanced codecs: I'm not one of them. The design parameters of that chip (HDMI transmitter), which were released by Silicon Image, clearly do not include the bitstreaming of the advanced audio codecs: the later HDMI chip produced by Silicon Image, however, clearly spells out advanced audio codec bitstream capabilities.
DTS-HD Master Audio would be a firmware upgrade to the PS3, such that it would decode in software (the way the PS3 handles all audio) rather than a dedicated SoC (hardware) solution. The resulting multichannel PCM from the decode, up to 7.1 channels, would then be sent via HDMI to the receiver. I don't see DTS-HD Master Audio coming until after the PS3 is "officially" upgraded to Profile 2.0 status (probably Q2).
Since the PS3 is more-or-less Profile 2.0 right now, I don't see why SCEA can't include DTS-HD Master Audio in the next firmware update (provided the software decode version is available at that time).
-------------"I have found that if you love life, life will love you back." -Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982)
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