Samsung DVD-HD850 Up-Converting DVD Player
Good player, annoying features
I bought this player because I have had two previous Samsung models, and liked them very much. Also, I believe Samsung is the only non high end brand to offer a full one year warranty, may be wrong there but the Sonys for example offer 1 year parts and 90 days labor. <br /> <br />I tried out several competing products and the picture on this one beat all on my TV (Panasonic TH-50PX50U). The picture was brighter, sharper, and the colors better in both standard and upconversion mode. The upconversion feature does somewhat improve the picture quality, but HDTV it is not. I can't really judge sound because I use my receiver to decode the digital signal, therefore there was no detectable difference. It has no issues with some badly scratched dvds that were beyond my old player, and so far plays all of my own recorded dvds without a hiccup. I have not noticed the lag with the remote some users have complained about. <br /> <br />I do have two complaints though. First is that fast forwards jumps from 4X to 64X. I find 4X too slow for more than a few seconds, and 64 is pretty fast to hit the spot you want closer than within 3-4 minutes. Second is that there seems to be no way to set the subtitles to \\"none\\" by default. You can turn them off once they start, but the setup gives you a only a choice of languages for the default. I tried choosing something that should be obscure here like Finnish with the hope that nothing would come up, but still I get subtitles appearing on about 25% of my movies. Kind of annoying, a simple \\"none\\" option in the setup would fix this. I tried talking to Samsung about it, they had no good suggestion.