Samsung DVD-HD841 Up-Converting DVD Player
A player that manages to make your DVDs worse
Samsung has made a name for themselves by mass-copying other people's ideas and selling them at deep discounts.  Unfortunately most of their efforts come up half-empty -- but their wares are cheap enough (and stylish enough in some cases) to fool many low-end consumers.  The DVD-HD841 is one such example.<br /><br />If you search on teh web, you'll see this player got very low ratings from professional reviewers (e.g., New York Times).  My own testing confirmed the negative reviews: surprisingly, instead of \\"upconverting\\" your DVDs, this player can make your DVD image quality go down when you hook it up (via DVI) to an HDTV monitor.  Picture output from the DVD-HD841 tends to be dark and the details tend to be muddy.  Also, red is over-emphasized and leads to bleeding in many cases, especially if you have a \\"low-quality\\" DVD movie where the producers did a poor job of transfering film to DVD.  If you try the same discs on the superb Panasonic DVD-S97 (a DVD freak's dream machine in terms of quality), you can see the HUGE differene in video quality.  The Samsung is just a POS in terms of image quality, period.  In fairness, it's probably as good as your $20 Apex or Norcent DVD player, but the latter players cost less than 1/10 of this one, not counting the price of the DVI cable.<br /><br />If you want a real, high-quality upconverting DVD player, steer clear of this poor choice.  Consider the Panasonic or, like an earlier reviewer recommended, the Toshiba, which is very good and cheaper, too.  I also liked the Denon 1910 (and its Denon 755S twin) which is also much better and somewhat cheaper.<br /><br />Feel free to e-mail me with any DVD player or HDTV questions.