Samsung BD-P4600

Reading the specs of the P4600, we found ourselves wondering whether Samsung had managed to create the perfect CD, DVD and Blu-ray player, despite its unusual blocky shape. 

It might not be the most recent incarnation of the all-powerful Korean giant's genius, but it was definitely worth taking a closer look.

Hardware and design

Before we delve any deeper, we should warn you that the games console-looks won't necessarily be at home in everybody's front room.  You can choose to either hang it on on the wall--next to your flatscreen TV, for instance--stack it on top of other devices, or even stand it up at a 25° angles thanks to a stand that you can attach to the flat surface underneath.  You insert discs on the right-hand side, using a drive that quickly swallows them up, rather than a slide-out drawer. 

Something else that's worth pointing out--and it's very important--is that the connectivity options have been reduced to a bare minimum, with just a HDMI port, composite video out, an Ethernet port and two USB ports.  That's right, two, but the second is not just for show.  You can use one of them to  connect the P4600 to a wireless network using a WiFi dongle.  Once you've used one USB port for that, you'll want to keep it plugged in the whole time, so having a second USB port you can use for connecting external storage is a great idea!



Come one, come all: DivX, DivX HD, JPEG HD ...
Samsung's real strength here has been giving the P4600 support for a huge range of formats.  Both DivX and DivX HD are welcome, either via the USB port, on a DVD or from an external hard drive formatted as either FAT32 or NTFS.  Non-HD DivX files can even be read from a CD.  Support is also  available for JPEG, JPEG HD and MP3 files, again over USB, from the hard drive or on DVDs and CDs.  To round off this selection, the P4600 can also handle AVCHD files from camcorders stored on CDs or DVDs.  We're very glad to see such a wide range of compatibility, which makes this device a real digital media hub.

Another feature that impressed was PC streaming.  Once the P4600 joins a network (whether it's wired or wireless), it can search other computers to find DivX, MP3 and JPEG files.  Once again, it's a feature that we're already familar with thanks to its similarity to what DLNA offers, although there isn't the same guarantee of success.

The onscreen menu has plenty of options, handling all the audio and video modes, testing the network connections, the 1 GB of internal memory for BD-Live and a whole range of other settings.  More complicated features like adjusting gamma levels and noise reduction filters aren't included though, which iis a shame, but Samsung has clearly decided to opt for a product that's easy to use.

For video, the machine includes a 12 bit 148.5 MHz DAC convertor to get DVD video up to 1080p with the minimum of problems ... that's the idea anyway.

Image Quality

Here, we're going to divide our comments into two different sections given the disparity between the results: one for DVDs, and one for Blu-ray.  The P4600's performance is so different in both areas that it's important not to mix the two.  We started with a series of DVDs that we know well, and found that upscaling to 1080p was something of a mixed bag.  The image is still bright and colourful, but you can spot a layer of digital noise and/or some pixellated areas, like small blocks found around the edge of curves.  It's nothing major on a 37'' TV, but if you've got a huge 3 metre wide television like the on we used for these tests, then you'll be able to notice the problem more easily.  So, without hammering the point home, upscaling to 1080p is average, but not an absolute disaster.  It's this player's main weakness, as we saw a whole new side to it when we tried Blu-ray discs containing both real movies and test cards.

Watching The Green Mile and Terminator 4 was a real treat: the detail was incredibly sharp, with only a little noise--film grain was intact--bright colours (often too bright, actually, but you can't adjust them) and fluid movements in 24p mode.  In short, we had no problems with Blu-ray discs, leaving this player comfortably in the mid-range for displaying HD video.

Our tests with DivX files on a DVD also turned up reasonable results, with one small irritation: if you press 'pause', the machine quickly switches to standby, forgetting where you were when you restart playback.  Perhaps a firmware update will correct this problem though.

The final score of 3 in this section is an average of the Blu-ray performance (4) and the DVD performance (2).


Audio Formats

This is a Blu-ray player that goes straight for the target with professional aplomb, and there's no need to worry, it's compatible will every HD audio format from 1.0 up to 7.1 channels, which it can spit out of the HDMI output ready to send to your TV.  There isn't an analogue multi-channel audio output, but it does handle audio formats as a bitstream. 

Our Measures

Average energy consumption: 21 W
Energy consumption on standby: less than 1 W
Start-up time: 13 s
Access time for a Blu-ray disc with a simple interface, once the player is switched on: 14 s