Samsung BD-D5700 Blu-ray player

This weekend we bought a Samsung BD-D5700 Blu-ray player.  So far I've been pretty happy with it.  The online reviews are kinda mixed though.  It seems like most that are rating it poorly have defective units though.  No issues of that sort with ours but it's only been a couple days.

Our TV is only 720p, but I still see a good improvement in image quality. I only had one movie to test with though. We have the TRON Legacy combo pack so I could try each movie and see the differences.  It was a bit subtle, but there.

The load times of the BR vs the DVD were noticeably longer, but not terrible. It was something I was expecting too.  Though without a reference point I can't say if those BR load times are slower, faster, or normal.

I've not tried any of the streaming video options (Hulu+, Netflix, Blockbuster) just because we are not members of any of those services.  That's partly due to me being a A/V quality snob, but mostly because there has been so much shake-up in availability that you pretty much can't stick to just one for everything and even with all of them there is still a lot of content that isn't available streaming.  That said, now that we have the interfaces, we now have the opportunity to try them.

So far the biggest feature we've used is the digital media streaming (DLNA) from my PC and USB thumb drive.  They both use the same interface and it's pretty straight forward.  The image quality was really nice. Part of that is the source material but I think it's doing it's best to upconvert the lower resolution videos too.  It supported all but some MOV files. I can live with that.

The one weird thing was that occasionally the DLNA video stream would get slightly out of sync.  We thought it was my computer going to sleep or something but that didnt appear to be the problem. The first time it happened was about 12 minutes into a video.  The next time it was 14 minutes...but we'd been watching nearly 3 hours of video from the same source.  Both times I switched to the thumb drive and it worked fine from there.

I had copied the media to the thumb drive first because I didn't know about the DLNA option. Even when I did I was worried that the WiFi connection might not be strong enough.  It was a backup.

Another oddity that I never did figure out. The video via the network wouldn't allow me to fast forward.  Via the USB it wasn't a problem.  Is this something in the way DLNA streams the video? It was kinda a pain.

So, thus far I'm pleased with the purchase. It's a nice machine, especially for the money.