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

I've never felt so conflicted about a piece of home theater gear in my life. On the one hand, the BD-P3600 offers very good to excellent audio and video performance on DVDs and Blu-ray Discs as well as some great internet streaming features. On the other hand the "PC Streaming" feature is frustratingly hard to use and unreliable to the point that I finally gave up trying to get it to work.

A few die-hard audio/videophiles were worried when Samsung chose not to include the excellent Silicon Optix Reon HQV video processor in this year's line-up of Blu-ray Disc players. The DVD upconversion on last year's BD-P2500 was outstanding and many of us were concerned that its omission from the BD-P3600 would lead to noticeably inferior standard def performance. Turns out there was little to worry about as both the DVD and Blu-ray performance of the BD-P3600 are excellent, comparable to Panasonic's DMP-BD80 and superior to LG's BD370.

Also, with on-board decoding of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio over HDMI/PCM and multi-channel analog outputs, the audio performance and flexibility of the BD-P3600 is also excellent. Throw in the included WiFi dongle, BD-Live support, quick disc loading, Netflix online streaming and Pandora internet radio and you get one full-featured high performance Blu-ray player. That is until you try out Samsung's new PC streaming feature.

With PC streaming, you can access media files (photos, music and Divx videos) directly from a PC with shared folders on the same home network... at least in theory. When we tested this, the "automatic" feature to detect sharable PCs on the network failed entirely and we had to resort to manually providing the IP address of the PC, and even this was not reliable. This process wouldn't be such a pain except that the player does not have a "remember me" function to remember the IP address, share name, userid and password for the next connection, and entering all of this manually using the remote and on-screen graphical keyboard is a time-consuming process. Also, we found that the player hung on multiple occasions while attempting to playback AVIs from the networked PC, and the only way to recover from this was a re-boot (which, of course, forgot all of our network information). Meanwhile, playback of the same content from a USB flash drive connected to the player's front or rear USB port, worked reliably, without all the drama.

As a Blu-ray Disc and DVD player, the BD-P3600 performs very well. It is one of the fastest players to load up both standard DVDs and Blu-ray Discs (faster, in most cases, than even the PS3). Also, the Pandora and Netflix streaming features are very reliable and add quite a bit to the overall flexibility and versatility of the player. But Samsung really should have waited to release the PC streaming feature until it was more robust and more reliable. If you promise not to use this feature, then I'd happily recommend the BD-P3600 as a full-featured high performance Blu-ray and DVD player. But those who do want to take advantage of PC streaming are in for some serious frustration.

A full review is available at Big Picture Big Sound (dot com). Get more detail about Samsung BD-P3600 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player.