Last Updated December 20, 2008   Product Rating   Excellent image quality Plays Blu-ray and supports Profile 2.0 online content Netflix streaming Full set of connections to home theater equipment   Lacks DTS-HD Master Audio decoding Slow disc loading times

Blu-ray DVD technology has been taking off recently and prices on the Blu-ray players have dramatically come down over the past year. If you're in the market to buy a new DVD player for your home entertainment setup you might want to take a look at getting the Samsung BD-P2500 Blu-ray DVD player. It delivers very good image quality and sound features, such as Netflix streaming functionality, that help make it one of the best (and one of the cheaper) Blu-ray DVD players around.

The design of the Samsung BD-P2500 is very sleek and fits in nicely in any home entertainment center. On the front of the glossy black face of the device, there's a row of a few buttons and the disc tray. There's also a directional pad for navigation and playback control and there's also a LCD in the center of the device for displaying information. The remote control for the BD-P2500 is pretty standard and features a directional pad as well for playback control and there's a cluster of frequently used buttons that surround it.

As we said before, the feature set of the Samsung BD-P2500 is very solid and will suit any video buff. The biggest feature of the player is the ability to stream rented videos from Netflix's "Watch Now" section. To access it, you just have to plug it into your home's high-speed Internet connection via Ethernet cable (no Wi-Fi) and you can use it to watch streaming movies from your Netflix account. With this Internet connectivity, this means the Samsung BD-P2500 is "Profile 2.0" compliant, which allows it to access Internet-only extras on some of the latest Blu-ray movies.

The BD-P2500 supports the usual audio outputs and setups, including decoding for Dolby TrueHD, but it does lack DTS-HD Master Audio. Samsung said the device will receive a firmware update via the Internet (so it's good to have it connected to the Internet even if you don't plan on using the online features) to support on-board DTS-HS Master Audio decoding. Connectivity on the device is very wide-spread and has a lot. It features an HDMI output, which outputs 1080p high-definition video as well as multichannel audio, and there is also a component out, which allows output of Blu-ray content at 1080p and other DVDs at 480p. The audio outputs include 7.1 analog connections for non-HDMI receivers and an optical digital output.

The on-screen menus are very nicely designed and are organized to be user friendly. On a side note, for such a high-end Blu-ray player, Samsung's logo when you first turn on the device is one of the worst logos ever seen. It's very jaggy and looks very low quality. However, the image quality from Blu-ray movies is totally stunning and life-like. There's nothing to complain when using an HD Blu-ray movie and the picture quality. It simply couldn't be any better. There is one downside to this player, which is the load times for inserting a disc and the time it takes for it to start playing. The load time can vary from 30 seconds to over a minute. There can also be a little delay when you skip via chapters while the movie is playing, but it's not enough to really feel disappointed. One note about watching streaming Netflix videos is that they are displayed in standard definition 4:3 aspect ratio and not wide-screen high-definition, but that's due to Netflix, not the player.