The Samsung BD-P1600 Blu-Ray Player isn't perfect but definitely worth taking a close look at.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Excellent HD playback, low price, Netflix, Blockbuster and Pandora Streaming

Cons: Proprietary USB dongle needed for Wireless access, not fully profile 2.0 compliant

The Bottom Line: 
If you can overlook its flaws then this may be the player for you.

Author's Review
We've actually owned high definition televisions since 2003 but have been using standard definition DVDs for much of our movie watching until just about a year ago when we bought our first Blu-Ray player, a Playstation 3. In the following months, we found that we enjoyed watching the high definition Blu-ray movies enough to be willing to go out and purchase a second, dedicated player for the screen in the room upstairs. We looked at several different models but when we saw the Samsung BD-P1600 on sale at a great price we decided to take it home and give it a try.

What is it?

The BD-P1600 is Samsung's 5th generation Blu-ray player. It features the ability to play both high definition Blu-ray media as well as the older standard definition DVDs. The BD-P1600 is a profile 2.0 compatible Blu-ray player meaning that it is capable of all of the features currently available on Blu-Ray discs (movie playback, picture in picture, BD-Live, etc.)  as well as also being capable of streaming video content from Blockbuster, Netflix &  You Tube as well as audio content from Pandora.

The BD-P1600 is a very nice looking player, with a smooth glossy black front panel which covers essentially the entire front of the player. However you need to flip down this panel whenever you wish to access the controls (other than the power switch), front USB port or to insert or remove discs from the player which is not only awkward but can be annoying especially if you are using the front USB port in that it forces you to leave the panel down which seriously detracts from the overall appearance of the player.

The BD-P1600 has the following connections available:

HDMI (V 1.3)
Component Video Output
Composite Video Output
S-Video Output
Optical Digital Audio Output
Analog Audio Output
Ethernet port
USB Ports (2) one in front and one in back

The BD-P1600 comes with a black remote control which while loaded with buttons can be navigated fairly easily once you become accustomed to it. However the remote has no backlighting features so using in the dark is much more difficult.

The Samsung BD-P1600 offers the ability to stream content from Blockbuster On-Demand, Netflix, You Tube and Pandora. In order to access these features you will need to have a high speed internet connection and either access to a wired Ethernet port in the room you are using the BD-P1600 in or to purchase a wireless networking dongle for one of the USB connectors. However not just any wireless USB connector will work, you are essentially required to use a proprietary networking dongle available only from Samsung at an additional cost of about $80. No other (potentially less expensive) USB networking connector will work with the BD-P1600. Thus Samsung is in essence attempting to force you to pay them more money if you wish to have wireless networking abilities for the BD-P1600.

However, I have found that it is possible to utilize a wireless networking bridge (I used one designed to work with video game consoles) and to just connect the BD-P1600 to the bridge via the Ethernet connection. This enabled me to obtain wireless access for the BD-P1600 at a cost of roughly $40 for the wireless bridge (a Trendnet wireless gaming adaptor, model # TEW-647GA) rather than paying nearly twice as much for the proprietary Samsung device.

How well does it work?

One of the biggest complaints people have had regarding Blu-ray players has been the slow power up and disc loading times, well I am happy to say that with the BD-P1600 this is much less of an issue. It takes only a few seconds from the time you power it up until the door opens to accept a disc and we have found that many discs seem to average on the order of about 15 to 20 seconds to load depending upon the movie being played (for example, Patriot Games took 17 seconds to load). However some discs (by Disney and Sony especially) still seem to take nearly a minute from the time they go into the player until they are ready to play (Spider-man 3 took 55 seconds, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest - 67 seconds).  Although due to the number of extra features that both of those movies have with them compared to Patriot Games, I suspect though that these longer load times are due more to the amount of Bonus materials that the specific movie may have had added to the Blu-ray rather than some flaw in the BD-P1600.

As a Blu-ray player, the BD-P1600 has worked beautifully for us, rendering crisp, clear 1080p images on our screen and outputting Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks to our receiver over the HDMI connection. We have honestly seen nothing to really complain about when watching high definition content with the BD-P1600 except for the fact that if we have to shut down the player in the middle of a movie, the BD-P1600 seems unable to remember where we stopped watching the film forcing us to start over from the beginning if we attempt to finish watching the movie the next day. It seems odd that a feature common to even $40 DVD players is missing from a state of the art Blu-ray machine.

We utilize the HDMI output through our receiver to our projector for audio and video playback however the BD-P1600 does offer the option to use component video and optical digital audio output for people with older HD systems (however, audio is limited to Dolby or DTS 5.1 through the optical output).

Playback of standard definition DVDs is acceptable with the BD-P1600 doing an adequate job of upconverting the 480i video content to 1080p, however I do have to note that DVDs did appear sharper and to have more "pop" when played back through our PS3, indicating that the game machine does a bit better job as an upconverting DVD player than the BD-P1600 can manage.  

Playback of the HD streaming video content offered by the video services has been fairly enjoyable. While the overall video and audio quality of such streaming HD content is not up to the level that you might experience with Blu-ray playback, it is in general superior to watching the same content from a standard definition DVD. However be advised that standard definition content streamed through the BD-P1600 can be fairly disappointing in that in some cases it can look inferior to a regular DVD presentation. This lower quality however is the fault of the video provider (Netflix, BB, etc) and the manner in which they have encoded the program and so the quality of some of these lower resolution offerings cannot really be blamed on the BD-P1600.

The audio streaming from Pandora isn't used often in our home but I have to say that when we have used it, the sound has been clear and enjoyable.

As I mentioned earlier, the BD-P1600 is a profile 2.0 compatible player. What does that mean? Put simply, the BD-P1600 is capable of all of the standard profile 2.0 functions straight from the box except for the ability to utilize BD-Live.

What is BD-Live?

Basically BD-Live is the ability of the player to download additional content for the movie, like trailers or extra scenes off of the web and to hold live chat sessions with other people who may be logged in and watching the same movie that you are at the same time. The BD-P1600 is capable of utilizing this feature but lacks the on-board memory to be able to do so. This means that if you want to make use of the BD-Live features you will need to plug a USB flash drive (with a minimum of 1 gigabyte of memory) into the player in order to be enable this feature. Note that the BD-P1600 only has two USB ports, one in the front and one in back and if you are planning to use the Samsung wireless dongle as well as adding a USB flash drive this will require you to use both ports on the player. As the USB port on the front of the player can only be accessed while the front panel is down, this means that you would be forced to leave the panel down permanently if you are going to have both ports in use this way. This effectively ruins the "sleek" look of the front of the player and could be a consideration for people who enjoy having their electronic equipment visible and on display.

Of course if you don't care to enable the BD-Live functions or are using an Ethernet connection for internet access then this is essentially a non-issue.

Summary

Although not perfect, the BD-P1600 does a good job for us as a high definition media player, and an adequate job with DVD playback. If you are able to overlook or work around the limitations of the BD-P1600 then it may be worth considering taking a look at.

Copyright: L. J. Monaghan ~ 2010


=========================================================================
If you enjoyed this review then you may wish to take a look at my other reviews of similar products:

Toshiba RS-TX20 DVD Player Tivo Recorder

Sony DVP NS75H Single Disc DVD player

Apex AD 1500 DVD player

=========================================================================