Samsung DVD-HD860 Up-Converting DVD Player
Not a good player, for HD JPEGs or otherwise
My notes on my brief experience with the HD860.  I was primarily interested in it since it supposedly did High-Def JPEG viewing.  Well... <br /> <br />THINGS WRONG WITH THE SAMSUNG HD860 DVD PLAYER: <br />================================================== <br />Doesn't remember where playback should resume if disk is ejected, not even for one disc  (Wow?!??! haven't seen that in a while).  There apparently is a bookmark function, but it's  all menu-driven, cumbersome and lame, so I didn't even test it.  Bookmark function is also  footnoted in the manual \\"may not work on all discs\\" (see below for more on that.) <br /> <br />All remote control functions are slow.  There's a noticeable lag when pressing any button. <br /> <br />when using HDMI out, coaxial digital output is disabled.  I didn't check optical digital  output, though, but it seems unlikely it would work either.  There was no option to enable  this in the setup menus, not that I could find.  Audio comes through HDMI cable, and needs to be rerouted from your TV to surround receiver, which did work fine on my Samsung big-screen TV. <br /> <br />Remote is not a universal remote, DVD only.  And I mean only. <br /> <br />The \\"skip ahead\\" and \\"skip back\\" buttons didn't work at all while watching \\"House of Flying  Daggers\\".  Once during playback, pressing the \\"instant skip\\" (skip ahead) button on remote caused movie to hang on a single frame, necessitating unplugging the power to reset  (!?!??!).  There's quite a few places in the manual where features like these are footnoted  with \\"may not work on all discs\\".  Methinks they're covering their a**es for features that don't work on ANY discs. <br /> <br />Pressing \\"info\\" while displaying JPEGs in HD mode does nothing.  No menu, no filename,  nothing.  So no on-screen menus or help while viewing HD JPEGs, which means HD JPEG viewing is a hobbled afterthought! <br /> <br />Sometimes pressing \\"next picture\\" (i.e. \\">>|\\") while viewing JPEGs causes the screen to go  blank.  Pressing it again then proceeds to next picture.  Obviously quirky firmware. <br /> <br />Have to manually set JPEG showing to Hi-Def; Default is standard def. Why can't it automatically detect that I'm hooked up to an HDMI hi-def set and do the right thing?   <br /> <br />Painting a 233kb, 1728x792 JPEG took four full seconds, kinda slow.  Needless to say, no  controls for nice transitions, just a straight paint-down from the top. <br /> <br />JPEG slideshows would occasionally randomly hang with a blank screen indefinitely. <br /> <br />On my 720p set, with DVD player's output manually set to 720p via HDMI, an 800 pixel tall JPEG would show up as less than the full height of the screen, so it's obviously  upconverting as though it's going to show through 1080, then \\"downconverting\\" back to 720p.  I would have thought that an 800-pixel-tall image should show up full-height while in 720p mode, but apparently Samsung feels otherwise.  This causes all images 720-to-1080 pixels tall to not display as well as they could, at least on a 720p set. <br /> <br />I have no idea whether it's properly finding all the JPEGs on my disc.  There's no \\"I'm showing you JPEG X of Y\\" display anywhere. <br /> <br />Could not, for the life of me, get \\"random\\" or shuffle viewing to work while running a slideshow, in contradiction to the abilities stated in the manual.  That's a real showstopper for me. <br /> <br /> <br />ON THE PLUS SIDE: <br />=============================== <br />Picture quality is indeed good for both movies and JPEGs, movie \\"pause\\" quality is especially excellent compared to my cheap Sony progressive scan player. <br /> <br />Does recognize long JPEG filenames, although you can't read them all in the lame browser they give you. <br /> <br />Does properly display overly-large JPEGs, and JPEGs of various aspect ratios.  If you've got  a huge JPEG that's in proper 16:9 aspect ratio, it looks pretty darn good. <br /> <br />SUMMARY: <br />================================== <br />I can't imagine building a worse HD JPEG DVD player.  Samsung, you should be ashamed.