Price Paid:  $129.00 from WALMART

Summary:
Cheap DVD player. Samsung was always bottom feeders and still are.

Strengths:
Cheap

Weaknesses:
Has a tough time dealing with most DVD discs.

Price Paid:  $94.00 from Wal-Mart Canada

Summary:
I saw this player selling for $129 CDN (approx $94 USD today) while walking in a local Wal-Mart and decided to give it a try and at the same time try out the Samsung name. I've heard their products have been steadily improving over the years like many other Korean products so I figured I had nothing to lose. And Wal-Mart has a 90-day refund policy. It's a nice looking unit and stood out from the RCA and Philips junk that was also for sale. I disconnected my golden Panasonic DVD-RV30 that has been working flawlessly for me for the last 3 years. It's connected to my Yamaha RX-V596 DD/DTS Receiver via Toslink, and to my Sony KV-32SFS13 Wega television by component video. I took those same connections and plugged them into the Samsung. First off, the Samsung has no toslink connection! They must've cheapened out by omitting this connection so they wouldn't have to pay a royalty fee to Toshiba for using toslink, but a lot of manufacturer (incl. Sony) are doing this on their bottom-line models. So I take out an improper, but sufficient 75 Ohm video cable with RCA plugs and use that. Then I connected the video and powered up. Whoa. The picture was WAY off, it was red, grainy and had diagonal "interference" lines all over it. So I figured I might have connected the component video wrong? I checked it, red to red, green to green, blue to blue. no problem there and I know it wasn't the cable because it worked perfectly with the Panasonic. I also made sure the progressive scan selector switch on the back was set to off (525i for interlaced). Still no good. I tried swapping the plugs around since maybe the connections were mislabeled. No use. I gave up on the component video and stuck in an S-Video connection instead. Works! I put in the Rush Hour 2 DVD. The DVD defaults to Dolby Digital and I started playing it, but there's no 5.1 showing up on the receiver. No sound on DTS soundtrack at all, either. I stop playing and go to the main menu where, unbelievably, I have to enable DD bitstream (instead of PCM) and DTS out. Shouldn't they assume most people using digital audio have a DD 5.1 receiver nowadays)? So that's fixed. I start playing the DVD and notice the picture is grainy as hell, especially when there's a uniform background. Picture lacks richness in colour either and it looks like I'm watching a cable feed. Seemed like the refresh rate is off too because I noticed a flicker, something I never got from the Panasonic. Skin tones look unnatural. Plus, after watching for around 10 minutes, I noticed the audio starts to lag behind the video. A chapter skip solves this but it soon happens again. I thought DVD player manufacturers solved this problem a long time ago, ever since the notorious 1st-2nd generation Sonys had this problem. It wasn't fixed here. Sound is OK in quality but it's the receiver doing the decoding, not the player. My makeshift audio cable is doing the trick. Zoom feature is good in principle but also makes an already grainy image look grainer. I wouldn't use it. Also the disc tray makes a grinding noise when it moves. I'll bet the entire unit is based around a computer DVD-ROM with an encoder board if I ever were to open it. This is going back to the store. I'm going to stick with Panasonic instead. It's not a terribly bad unit, I've seen worse like an Apex unit I picked up in a store one time and turned it so the back faced upwards so I could look at the connections. The tray rolled out because of the gravity pull. It wasn't even capable of keeping the tray in place! That was ultimate cheap. But I got what I paid for. Spend less, receive less.

Strengths:
-Nice looks -Cheap price -Progressive Scan (not tested) -Plays MP3, WMA, JPEG, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R -Batteries come already loaded in the remote

Weaknesses:
-Plays MP3s, but can't fast-search on a song -Remote has TINY buttons for reverse and forward scan, and previous and next track buttons. Impossible to remember which is which since they're the same shape -Front display is uninformative and plain looking.

Similar Products Used:
Sony DVP-S360 Panasonic DVD-RV30 Panasonic DVD-RV32

Price Paid:  $94.00 from Wal-Mart Canada

Summary:
I saw this player selling for $129 CDN (approx $94 USD today) while walking in a local Wal-Mart and decided to give it a try and at the same time try out the Samsung name. I've heard their products have been steadily improving over the years like many other Korean products so I figured I had nothing to lose. And Wal-Mart has a 90-day refund policy. It's a nice looking unit and stood out from the RCA and Philips junk that was also for sale. I disconnected my golden Panasonic DVD-RV30 that has been working flawlessly for me for the last 3 years. It's connected to my Yamaha RX-V596 DD/DTS Receiver via Toslink, and to my Sony KV-32SFS13 Wega television by component video. I took those same connections and plugged them into the Samsung. First off, the Samsung has no toslink connection! They must've cheapened out by omitting this connection so they wouldn't have to pay a royalty fee to Toshiba for using toslink, but a lot of manufacturer (incl. Sony) are doing this on their bottom-line models. So I take out an improper, but sufficient 75 Ohm video cable with RCA plugs and use that. Then I connected the video and powered up. Whoa. The picture was WAY off, it was red, grainy and had diagonal "interference" lines all over it. So I figured I might have connected the component video wrong? I checked it, red to red, green to green, blue to blue. no problem there and I know it wasn't the cable because it worked perfectly with the Panasonic. I also made sure the progressive scan selector switch on the back was set to off (525i for interlaced). Still no good. I tried swapping the plugs around since maybe the connections were mislabeled. No use. I gave up on the component video and stuck in an S-Video connection instead. Works! I put in the Rush Hour 2 DVD. The DVD defaults to Dolby Digital and I started playing it, but there's no 5.1 showing up on the receiver. No sound on DTS soundtrack at all, either. I stop playing and go to the main menu where, unbelievably, I have to enable DD bitstream (instead of PCM) and DTS out. Shouldn't they assume most people using digital audio have a DD 5.1 receiver nowadays)? So that's fixed. I start playing the DVD and notice the picture is grainy as hell, especially when there's a uniform background. Picture lacks richness in colour either and it looks like I'm watching a cable feed. Seemed like the refresh rate is off too because I noticed a flicker, something I never got from the Panasonic. Skin tones look unnatural. Plus, after watching for around 10 minutes, I noticed the audio starts to lag behind the video. A chapter skip solves this but it soon happens again. I thought DVD player manufacturers solved this problem a long time ago, ever since the notorious 1st-2nd generation Sonys had this problem. It wasn't fixed here. Sound is OK in quality but it's the receiver doing the decoding, not the player. My makeshift audio cable is doing the trick. Zoom feature is good in principle but also makes an already grainy image look grainer. I wouldn't use it. Also the disc tray makes a grinding noise when it moves. I'll bet the entire unit is based around a computer DVD-ROM with an encoder board if I ever were to open it. This is going back to the store. I'm going to stick with Panasonic instead. It's not a terribly bad unit, I've seen worse like an Apex unit I picked up in a store one time and turned it so the back faced upwards so I could look at the connections. The tray rolled out because of the gravity pull. It wasn't even capable of keeping the tray in place! That was ultimate cheap. But I got what I paid for. Spend less, receive less.

Strengths:
-Nice looks -Cheap price -Progressive Scan (not tested) -Plays MP3, WMA, JPEG, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R -Batteries come already loaded in the remote

Weaknesses:
-Plays MP3s, but can't fast-search on a song -Remote has TINY buttons for reverse and forward scan, and previous and next track buttons. Impossible to remember which is which since they're the same shape -Front display is uninformative and plain looking.

Similar Products Used:
Sony DVP-S360 Panasonic DVD-RV30 Panasonic DVD-RV32