Samsung BD-C5500 Blu-ray Player Review

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Samsung BD-C5500 Blu-ray Player Review

Electronics and Home Entertainment

Saturday, 01 May 2010 16:26

Samsung BD-C5500 Blu-ray Player Review Samsung is one of the fastest growing consumer electronics companies on the planet. The BD-C5500 Blu-ray player illustrates why. It’s packed with features, easy to use and priced right.

For a while there if you were in the market for a Blu-ray player your best bet was to simply bite the bullet and pay for a Playstation 3. But prices have gone down while features and performance have gone up and now you can get a player like the Samsung BD-C5500 for about $150.

The cloud is changing everything. When Netflix launched several years ago the name seemed silly. Why were they calling the company Netflix when they ship DVDs back and forth in the mail? Well clearly the vision was to eventually deliver any movie at any time via the net. We’re not they’re yet. However, once you have an IP enabled box like the BD-C5500 it changes everything.

The BD-C5500 starts up fast to access Blu-ray discs and the picture and sound look great. We inserted The Matrix and quickly lost track of time. The soft touch controls on the unit and the remote control are very nice for a player in this price range.

The best way to connect the BD-C5500 to the Internet is with an Ethernet cable. Wireless requires a special Samsung part which we understand as it would be more difficult to support other wireless adapters at this price point. However, if you have an Ethernet port nearby you can jack into you’ll be very happy with the BD-C5500.

Pandora is one of the best music experiences around and now you can stream it live with BD-C5500. An authorization code comes with the Samsung BD-C5500 that you use to synchronize the device with your Pandora account. The best way to get started is to set up all your channels on the PC first and then fire up the BD-C500. Samsung did a really nice job with the GUI of Pandora on the player and integration with the remote. This feature alone makes the BD-C500 worth considering for music lovers. It competes nicely with the Music Choice channels provided by Comcast but would benefit from additional streaming elements ala Tune Wiki or simple photos and trivia. How about direct links to music videos?

The BD-C500 also includes Blockbuster, Vudu, YouTube and a variety of other apps and connectivity programs. Plus with a USB on the front of the unit and the ability to play all the most popular audio and video formats you truly have a complete entertainment system in one box.

The menu for accessing content on a USB drive is well laid out and easy to navigate. We loaded up music and videos on 16GB microSD cards and connected it with a little SanDisk microSD adapter. Works perfectly and barely protrudes from the front of the unit. We loaded some MP3 files with embedded album art but the BD-C5500 failed to recognize it instead displaying some arbitrary art based on the genre of the track. So it’s grabbing some of the meta data but not all of it which is totally lame. In fact, that’s a biggest complaint about the BD-C5500. How can you have an internet enabled device like this and not grab meta data or display the content that’s part of the file?

Other than that we love the Samsung BD-C5500. If you’re finally ready to phase out the old DVD player and want something more than a basic Blu-ray player the Samsung BD-C5500 is an excellent choice.

Visit Samsung for more information.

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