Samsung BD-C8500 500GB HDD Blu-Ray Home AV Centre with Wi-Fi
Monday, August 30th, 2010 at
7:46 pm
- Blu-ray Player / HDD Recorder
- Hard Drive Size500GB
- Freeview HD
- Audio: Digital Plus/Dts HD/Dolby True HD
- 1080/24p Playback: Yes
The Samsung BD-C8500M Blu-ray player, hard disk recorder and free-to-air HD receiver is a feature rich high definition solution. It provides full HD 1080p output, DVD upscaling, Freeview, 500GB hard disk and the latest DTS and Dolby decoding for immersive surround sound. It will also play DivX movies, MP3 music and JPEG photos from a disc or USB device and connect to the internet for additional content such as BD-live Blu-Ray material…. more >>
Rating: 
(out of 1 reviews)
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Review by DaveHep for Samsung BD-C8500 500GB HDD Blu-Ray Home AV Centre with Wi-Fi
Rating:
I was eagerly awaiting this Samsung BD-C8500 500GB HDD Blu-Ray Home AV Centre with Wi-Fi. The pictures looked good there was a lot of excitement in the press about this and I had been waiting for about three months to order one. The box arrived, I opened the box then opened the box inside the box, then the next box. It was like a russian doll. It really added to the anticipation of opening the product and getting it fired up.
It looked really nice with it’s pretty heart beat pulsing blue lights on the HDD and the blu-ray. I soon had the internet set up and it logged on to do it’s updates. This also added to the anticipation, although if I am honest when I say anticipation, I mean mild frustration. Why can’t it just work out of the box! It also needed to download the widgets and install them; altogether it took about 40 minutes to get it up and running.
The interface is reasonably straightforward to use and I was soon watching Channel 4 in high definition and spring-watch, which bowled me over with the picture quality. I tried one of the blu-ray discs that came in the box and that was when the anticipation slowly started to turn to a niggling feeling that maybe, just maybe I wasn’t going to be entirely overwhelmed with this. But I thought “No!, this has to be a brilliant product!”. The advert says it takes less than 15 seconds to boot up; it took about 1 minute! This wasn’t the worst thing though, I think I can live with waiting an extra 45 seconds for a film! The real problem with this product is that it is stupid!
This product is a real step backwards in technology. don’t be fooled by the internet@tv and the wifi. Whilst those functions work well on their own there is no point having them. I have just sold a 5 year old Humax standard definition twin tuner9200t PVR which could teach this pretender a thing or two.
The reason why? Well this brand new product which is sold as a home av centre has one major problem. You can only use one thing at once; I know stupid isn’t it! The Humax could record two things, play a third or depending on what channels you had recording you could watch a third. The Samsung however is massively disappointing, a product which is sold as a multitasker with a blu-ray player, wi-fi and internet@tv should be able to at least do two of those things simultaneously but it just hasn’t got the cerebral capacity! For instance if you are recording a tv channel and you want to leave that to watch a blu-ray you can’t! Instead you get a message that says “Do you want to leave this function and go to a new function?”.
It’s the same with any function you choose, either blu-ray, internet or freeview, you can only do one thing at once. I’m not going to go on and on about this and rant and rave. I would just recommend to you that if you are thinking about buying this to minimise the number of boxes and connections you have or even worse are about to sell your blu-ray player and freeview box thinking that this will do them both, then don’t!
The only good thing about this product is the picture quality. It is phenomenally brilliant. Both in high definition and standard definition. If this was a freeview tuner on it’s own it would be a brilliant (although overpriced) package) It’s just not worth buying it due to the lack of multitasking.
And one last thing, the love film widget even though it is brand new (bought in June) the love film widget says it will be available in May this year! And obviously still doesn’t work!
In summary, the box looks good, the picture quality is excellent which all makes it pretty but the lack of multi tasking functionality makes it a stupid box! Which is pretty stupid when there is so much competition around!