Samsung BD-P3600

Samsung BD-P3600

The Samsung BD-P3600 has a relatively high estimated street price for a Blu-ray Disc player ($290, as of December 14, 2009), but it delivers exquisite images from Blu-ray discs to your HDTV. With an Internet connection, it can stream videos from Blockbuster, Netflix, and Youtube, and music from Pandora. But it falls down on the little things, making the viewing experience more difficult than it should be. In our image-quality tests, the BD-P3600 received scores of Very Good for its Blu-ray-based content, almost straight across the board. In test after test, it showed better color and contrast than our reference player, the Sony PlayStation 3. Night scenes looked realistically dark without losing detail, colors were believable, and black-and-white images had excellent fidelity. In a tire in a shot from chapter 1 of Cars, I saw texture I had never seen before. Regrettably, this model didn't do nearly as well with DVD content. One judge felt that its handling of DVD color on both DVD tests was inferior to the PS3's. Another judge rated the Samsung's color better than the PS3's on Phantom of the Opera (chapter 3), though slightly worse--despite better handling of contrast--on Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (chapter 22).