Buying Samsung BD-P3600 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player

This is just my second review in many years of online shopping, but this product is so bad that I felt compelled to write. I ordered the BD-P3600 to match my excellent value-for-money Samsung 42" plasma TV and long-lived Samsung HT-TQ85 home theater system. The new Blu-Ray player produced excellent pictures, and Netflix streaming was great. This was definitely a 5 star product right out of the box -- until I made the mistake of accepting the offer of a firmware update on the second startup -- which almost immediately turned the BD-P3600 into a beautifully designed black glossy brick with a telltale constant "Load" indication on the front LED (lots of threads on AVS and CNET fora on this problem -- too bad I read them after I made this purchase).

The Samsung phone support folks had me go through a couple of reset procedures, but quickly determined that the player was dead from the neck up and asked me to pay to have it UPS'd to their service center. Cheapskate that I am, however, it went out via insured parcel post. Good news -- their techs reset it, uploaded firmware update 2.02, and UPS'd it back in short order. I was very happy. They did what they said they would do, the unit worked, the new firmware added a really cool streaming YouTube capability, and parcel post was relatively cheap. A definite 3 star product.

After a few days of excellent pictures from upconverted DVDs, great movies on Netflix, YouTubed cartoons for the kid and listening to my favorite music on Pandora (which did freeze after playing for a while, but no big deal), the system asked me if I wanted firmware update 2.04. I thought -- this could only make the machine better. Their software and hardware engineers had *surely* worked together to solve the earlier problems. I was wrong.

I am now looking at another steady "Load" indication on the front panel and trying to figure out how to work my schedule around another trip to the post office sometime this week. If I were the only one that this had happened to, it could be ascribed to user error -- but this is a systemic problem with this device (please Google "BD-P3600 brick") -- and Samsung needs to either fix this, or watch their Blu-Ray sales numbers dry up. Interestingly, people seem to be catching on to the fact that this thing is a lemon, and prices are falling like a brick (pun intended).

Bottom line -- stay away from this class of product from Samsung until they can get their software to play nice with their hardware.Get more detail about Samsung BD-P3600 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player.