No more Blu-ray players from Samsung (1 Viewer)

[Martin Dew]

Martin Dew submitted a new blog post

No more Blu-ray players from Samsung

Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

 

[John*Wells]

This is not good

 

[JQuintana]

Already being discussed

https://www.hometheaterforum.com/co...k-uhd-or-blu-ray-players.360880/#post-4704387

 

[Martin Dew]

Thanks, J. Admin asked me to post as news story, but appreciate link to discussion.

 

[Robin9]

I'm not going to panic just yet. When other manufacturers also announce they are discontinuing production of Blu-ray players, I'll go out and buy three or four players to last me out.

 

[PMF]

I'm not going to panic just yet. When other manufacturers also announce they are discontinuing production of Blu-ray players, I'll go out and buy three or four players to last me out.

Now that's what I call future-proofing; and I'm with 'ya Robin9, but I won't give my money to Samsung for doing this.
Sony, someone...please stand by, hold firm and don't go leaving us.

 

[Brian Husar]

Same with LG. Just got an LG 4K UHD player at the suggestion of Todd Erwin and it’s beautiful. Streaming doesn’t do it justice. LG, hold firm.

 

[Lord Dalek]

Two years ago I bought a cheap Samsung BDP-7000. Seems like it was a smart move.

 

[Carabimero]

I've been using a Samsung BD-E5900 3D WiFi Blu-ray Disc Player for years and like it so much I've had a spare in my closet for years too. Now I wonder if I should buy ANOTHER spare. My wife tolerated the first spare player with a roll of her eyes, but she might have me committed if I buy yet a third one...

Edit:

Me: Samsung isn't making Blu-ray players anymore.

Mrs. Carab: What?

Me: I'm serious.

Mrs. Carab: Do you want to buy another one?

Me: We have an extra one in the closet already.

Mrs. Carab: Yeah, but if we get a new one, maybe it will have an update to play x265 files. I know that drives you nuts.

Result: A third Samsung BD player with updated software has been ordered with the wife's blessing.

She's a keeper.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I regret selling my Oppo DVD player when I got my Oppo BD player. There was nothing wrong with it, and although I rarely used it, it wouldn't have been a bad idea to keep it around as a backup.

I still have my first BD player, which was a Sony from 2008. It's not hooked up anymore, but I keep it around because it has the analogue component outputs in addition to HDMI and I figured it didn't hurt to keep that capability. I have an older SD 16x9 projector from around 2006 and that's still in working order, and they're basically a pair at this point - I'm happy to loan out the combo for weddings, backyard barbecues, etc. They're holding up very well too.

 

[JQuintana]

That is dedication!

 

[Matt Hough]

I'm not going to panic just yet. When other manufacturers also announce they are discontinuing production of Blu-ray players, I'll go out and buy three or four players to last me out.

I have a spare player or two around here, but if another company goes out of the player business, I'll buy a new one as a final back-up. I have far too great an investment in discs not to be sure to have a means of playing and enjoying them.

 

[Carabimero]

Has this development made anyone second-guess investing any more money in blu-ray discs?

 

[Robin9]

Has this development made anyone second-guess investing any more money in blu-ray discs?

Absolutely not!

 

[Bryan^H]

Has this development made anyone second-guess investing any more money in blu-ray discs?

No way. I have so much invested in discs that I have to future proof myself (I still have an Oppo 4K sealed) with at least one more disc player.
My issue is that when I need to use it, I will have a newer TV down the road and by then televisions probably won't support HDMI. They will probably have no inputs at all for external hardware. Just a super smart TV that can sync up with any other device of the future. No cables needed.

 

[Worth]

Has this development made anyone second-guess investing any more money in blu-ray discs?

It's still possible to find working laserdisc and Beta players, so it's not something I'd worry about.

 

[Lord Dalek]

Has this development made anyone second-guess investing any more money in blu-ray discs?

The only thing this announcement has done is to get me to golfclap Criterion's decision NOT to jump into the UltraHD bear trap.

 

[jcroy]

Has this development made anyone second-guess investing any more money in blu-ray discs?

(Long rant).

My decision was made years ago, for slightly different reasons than the one you mention. I curtailed my movie bluray disc purchasing when I came to the realizaton that there's less and less new computer bluray-r drives being brought to the market. (This is in addition to coming to the realization that most bluray movies I buy, have very little to no rewatch value for me).


In the case of computer bluray-r drives, it turns out there's only two manufacturers left: LG and Pioneer for both generic bluray and 4Kbluray. Pioneer seems to be hemming and hawing more as time goes on, where Pioneer doesn't even have own dvd-r drives anymore. (PIoneer now just rebadges a generic LG dvdr drive).

The other big thing which led to my curtailment of buying bluray movie discs, is that some technical features of LG computer dvdr/blurayr drives are really nasty. There's a feature called "jamless play" on LG drives which basically returns back all zeros or garbage random data whenever the LG dvdr/blurayr drive comes across an unreadable defective bad sector on a dvd or bluray disc it is reading. This was an engineering decison which is a completely broken design from the start, and absolutely unacceptable to me.

If I can't precisely check that there's any bad sectors on bluray discs, then there's no point in doing any more "blind buys" of movie blurays. This LG "jamless play" function will fool you into believing a defective bad sector is actually a "good readable sector". Basically it gives an extreme false sense of security that a disc has no random bad sectors due to manufacturing defects.

A properly designed computer dvdr/bluray-r drive will return back a "read error message" whenever it comes across any unreadable sectors on a dvd or bluray disc. Before they were discontinued altogether, LiteOn and Samsung computer bluray-r drives did this properly.

Since my Pioneer computer dvdr/bluray-r drive is somewhat slower than my LG blurayr drives, nowadays I only buy movie bluray discs which I am willing to watch within 24 hours or so after purchase. (It takes around 30-60 minutes to check a dual-layer bluray disc on my Pioneer computer bluray drive).

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I regret selling my Oppo DVD player when I got my Oppo BD player. There was nothing wrong with it, and although I rarely used it, it wouldn't have been a bad idea to keep it around as a backup.

I still have my first BD player, which was a Sony from 2008. It's not hooked up anymore, but I keep it around because it has the analogue component outputs in addition to HDMI and I figured it didn't hurt to keep that capability. I have an older SD 16x9 projector from around 2006 and that's still in working order, and they're basically a pair at this point - I'm happy to loan out the combo for weddings, backyard barbecues, etc. They're holding up very well too.

I still have, and use, my old Oppo 980H DVD player . I keep a TV show loaded, and we usually watch an episode while eating dinner. Right now we are watching The Partridge Family -- this show did not age well.

I just did get rid of my first BD player -- a Sony from about the same era as yours. I gave it to my sister and her husband, who only had a DVD player. I still have two others (an older Panasonic and a newer Sony that I brought back from our South Carolina condo since we no longer use it down there). Plus I also have a Sony UHD player, and plan on eventually picking up another UHD player with Dolby Vision support. So, I should be set for quite awhile.

 

[Malcolm R]

I'm pretty confident there will be players available for years to come. They may not be made by the "major" name brands, but someone will make them. I saw a whole endcap of no-name DVD-only players at Walmart yesterday for under $24. Then the studios wonder why people stick with DVD rather than upgrade to blu-ray or 4K.