Samsung DVD-HD850 Up-Converting DVD Player
Good picture quality but faulty player
Today I took delivery of my HD-850 player.  At $110 including delivery it seemed like a good option for a HDMI/progressive scan player and includes an HDMI cable which is a nice bonus. <br /> <br />Connecting the player to my Viewsonic N3250W 32\\" HDTV was a breeze using the supplied HDMI cable.  After running the THX optimizer tests from a DVD, the unit was calibrated quickly and all my test movies played with a much greater picture quality than the units I've used before.  I've noticed a little color banding during certain scenes in The Incredibles but an otherwise fantastic picture.  Other movies with hard to render colors like the water scenes in U-571 seem to play with improved color rendition over the other players I've tried.  Movies with wide and easy to render color palettes render exceptionally. <br /> <br />Like everyone else here, I find the blue light obnoxious, and I've found some articles on how to disconnect it online.  It really does draw your eye from across the room.  The remote as previously observed needs to be pointed directly at the player in order to work, which is also somewhat annoying as it's quite unforgiving.  And finally, with some movies the player will display subtitles by default which is frustrating - this seems to be disc specific, but not a problem I've noticed with the same discs on other players. <br /> <br />Now for the 768p mode (which is deceptive).  The ViewSonic monitor supports a 768p mode natively (1366 x 768), however the HD-850 only supports a full screen 1024 x 768p mode. The Viewsonic TV will not recognize this mode.  So if you have a 1366x768 HDTV, you might find that you can still only support 480p, 720p and 1080i modes using the HDMI output, all of which look indistinguishable as observed by other reviewers (the 720p mode might be better - I'm undecided at this point). <br /> <br />Running the Viewsonic HDTV in 1:1 mode (which does no rescaling) with the HD-850 set to 720p results in black bars around the image as you'd expect, but a noticeably sharper image.  Presumably this is becuase the movie isn't being rescaled a second time from 720p to 768p by the TV after already being rescaled from 480i to 720p by the DVD player.  So you might end up with a better picture using a HDTV that's natively 1280 x 720 instead of 1366 x 768.  Still, even with the TV rescaling from 720p to 1366 x 768, the picture is outstanding. <br /> <br />NOTE: I'm sending the unit back tomorrow as it appears to be faulty. Whenever I place my XBOX on top of the unit, it loses power and the blue light refuses to come on (you'd think this would be a bonus). Applying pressure with my hand is sufficient to make the unit lose power and lose all its settings, even when a disc is inserted.  I'm assuming this isn't normal and the unit will be resplaced.  I'm satisfied with the performance otherwise so will just take an exchange.