Customer Reviews

Samsung DVD-HD950 HD Conversion DVD Player , Black

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Video via the HDMI is excellent. Audio using the coaxial out is also crisp and clear. Definately an above average player. That said though, I do not see any noticable improvement using either 720p or 1080i settings and HDMI output compared to my other player (Denon DVD-3800) which is using component outs. I observed no difference between the HD950 and the Samsung DVD-HD850. Television used was a Sony HDTV KD-34XS955 34" WEGA. This player was purchased primarily for the HDMI capability and the DivX playback support I had read about in reviews. However, the version of the DVD-HD950 available in the United States does NOT support DivX/XVID playback. The HD950 image on the Samsung website does show the DIVX logo on the player, but the player shipped to me did not have the logo when it arrived. I verified the lack of DivX playback myself with many file types/settings and double checked with Samsung support.

The black thin case is stylish The LCD screen is nice but bright and a fluorescent blue light shines around the power button. It would be nice if the light for the LCD screen could be turned off where you can still see the status of the DVD.

The remote control has many functions and the layout is logical. Each function on its control can be set as a default such as HDMI level, Screen settings, etc. The EZ view feature is nice which allows you to get rid of the black bars on certain DVDs without significant distortion.

Some features of the remote and DVD player are helpful, include the Replay and skip buttons (to speed through scenes or see the last 10 seconds when you dropped your napkin on the floor).

Set up with the HDMI cable was simple. Picture quality and sound are very good. The differences between 720p and 1080i are neglible. A noticeable difference is discernable between 420p and 720p. The default settings for sharpness and brightness make the picture too dull and soft (setting 3); Picture quality is improved when changed to setting 4.

It is not the best but a good value for the price.

Appearance: The black version looks a lot better than the silver one-silver version looks cheap-black version looks elegant, blue LED halo around power switch, white backlit display-looks nice and crisp. Features: comes with HDMI to HDMI cable and HDMI to DVI cable-extra value! Plays SACD's-big remote control with lots of functions. DVD player menu allows to set up sharpness, color saturation and brightness output -especially of value for people with LCD or DLP projectors. The picture quality through HDMI is very good, but a bit too soft with the default setting. I ran it on my Panasonic PT AE700u, and personally preferred to set the projector sharpness to a value in between 9-11, rather than kranking up the sharpness of the dvd player. Blacks through the HDMI port are really black, for my taste almost to black, but you can adjust the brightness to your own preference. It also allows you to enhance the black level output through component output. U.S. version plays region 1 dvd's only. I read about a way to make it region free, but that would only allow to play PAL dvd's etc. through component out, not through the HDMI port. Output options are 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i.

I tend to agree with most of what has been said about this DVD player. It's pretty decent, although probably not as good as of a picture as some others out there (Panasonic, Oppo) in the same price category. But then, can you really tell the difference and is it worth the extra money or loss of features? That decision is really for you to make. Different things are important for different people.

The DVD-HD950 does give you a lot of features for the price. The most highly rated upscaling player in terms of picture quality (Oppo) does not have the EZ-View feature (I *really* like this feature because my LCD TV does not do perfect blacks. Blacks bars on 2.39:1 movies are OK, but grey-ish black bars stink). The Panasonic S97S does have the equivalent of EZ-View, but is notably more expensive and does not come with cables (making it even more expensive in the end). The DVD-HD950 is a higher-end version of the DVD-HD850 in that it does DVD-Audio and SACD and comes with HDMI/DVI cables.

Your mileage as far as the upscaling/deinterlacing quality will vary depending on how well you TV does this. Some TVs come do with better technology than most upscaling DVD players, so you should try the player in all modes and see which one looks the best. Furthermore, keep in mind that which mode looks the best may also depend on the movie itself and how it was encoded.

Speaking of encoding, I *have* to chime in here regarding the confusion of progressive vs. interlaced in the actual DVD encoding. In short: "Aleksey" and "Count" basically are both right!

The long answer: All DVDs for the North America market store "fields" with 240 lines each. There is no way in the MPEG-2 scheme used by DVD players that you can store a single image of 480 *consecutive* lines. HOWEVER, film sources only have a new frame every 1/24th second. This means that it takes less time for your DVD player to read an odd/even pair of 240-line interaced fields (it does this every 1/30th of a second) than it does for the film frame to change. DVDs made from a film source take advantage of this fact and store a single "progressive" 480-line film frame as two interlaced 240-line fields. The DVDs have a special flag that tells the DVD player not to use the normal de-interlacing scheme it would use for standard NTSC 480i video. Instead, when it sees this flag your DVD player reads an odd/even pair of interlaced fields, and then weaves them together to construct a single perfectly progressive movie frame.

The hard part about deinterlacing a standard NTSC 480i stream is that the image actually changes between each 240-line field. For example, if I am watching a tennis ball fly across the screen on my local TV broadcast, then the position of that ball actually changes every 1/60th second. The odd and even interlaced fields are not part of the exact same image. This means that the deinterlacing technology has to try and compensate for this. This is a very difficult task and is the reason deinterlacing technology is such a big deal. This is in contrast to a film source, where your DVD player performs almost no work at all to reconstruct a perfect progressive image.

For more on this topic, I suggest reading sections 1.40 and 3.8 of the "Jim Taylor's Official DVD FAQ" availible online.

When I read the previous coments on this unit, I was still not clear as to what they really meant. The comment of excellent was ambigoous at best. Excellent compared to what??? Well, compared to regular progressive scan dvd that's what. While not quite HD TV quality, the improvement is quite significant. I was already dreading the posibility of having to replace many of my DVDs when the HD units became available. Not anymore, the difference is that good. I hooked it up with the supplied DVI adapter to a 57" rear projection tv. I left the other Sony dvd player hooked up. It had component monster cables, etc., I compared the Batman Begins dvd and the difference was remarkable. On the Vanilla Sky dvd, there is a scene in which Tom Cruise is pulling out a white hair. It was hard to see it on my tv before, but with the new player, it was as clear as, well, a white hair. Again, is not HD, but very close. A bargain buy.

A moth ago I purchased this DVD player to replace my 3-year-old Toshiba SD4800. I bought a Panasonic LCD projector. I read few reviews on line on greater resolution with a HD up converter DVD player. Samsung HD-950 and the HD-850 have been under $200 price range. This unit looks cool as it matches all my other components, which are also black. This unit comes with HDMI, Component, and S video connection. My main reason for purchasing this was the HDMI connection as my Panasonic projector offers it as connection option, which by far gives the best signal possible. Comparing to my older S-video HDMI is definitely improves the quality of the picture. I watched some of my movies from my collection newer movies definitely offer a difference in picture quality. There is a one feature I enjoyed from my older DVD player this lack is that whenever I turned the movie off with the DVD in it upon playing it again would not play it from where I stopped. There is another annoyance for those who have a projector. This DVD player lights up when it turns on the menu stays lit while it is in operation. Not a big deal if you watch it with a any other type of TV however beware that if you need total darkness you have to cover up the menu screen light as it is pretty powerful to give bit of illumination to the room if your DVD player is facing the screen. This is not the HD DVD nor the Blue Ray DVD player I was hoping to purchase it would serve as a player for now as the electronic industry is fighting another format war. Meaning it would not happen any time soon. DVD player with an either HDMI or DVI connection is the best solution for those who like to watch movies on HD TV and get the best picture quality.

I've been comparing the video output (HDMI vs. Component) and much to my surprise, the component video out at 480P had slightly better coloring, smoothness and less pixelation than the HDMI at either 720P or 1080I. I'm using this with the Samsung 50" Plasma HPR5072. The HDMI out for some reason was somewhat pixelated, but still much sharper than SVideo or composite. I thought that the 720p or 1080i upconverted image would be better quality, but not so in my case. That said, since this is a relatively inexpensive HDMI player, perhaps other higher-end players will perform better. My cable quality isnt an issue since I'm using Monster cabling for both.

By they way, as I understand the issue, the upconverting only works with HDMI. Component outputs wont transfer the 720p or 1080i upconverted image to your tv.

I should mention that the picture with component cabling at 480P is still a leap ahead of the previous progressive scan 480P dvd player I owned (Samsung DVD P230), which also had component out.

Some DVD's look better than others, depending on the quality of the DVD.

To summarize, even though I find the 480P component cabling option the best for my needs, I do think it was worth it to buy this player since the image quality is so much better than my previous player with supposedly the same specifications. However, I'm not using the upconverting feature of this player any longer, which is a bit of a waste.

I have had this DVD player for almost a year. I have been very happy with its performance. It was easy to hook up with the HDMI cable that came with the product. The picture quality is great. The only negative would be the small display.

This is a great dvd player, anyone who enjoys dvds will find this dvd simple to use, and easy to hook up. lots of options and its not that silver chrome color that we have had in the industry for years.

Please don't let the false comments by Aleksey Sundeyev discourage you from reading my review of the "up-scaling" technology. It was a well thought out review that made very cursory mention of the fact (yes, the FACT) that no DVDs are encoded at 480p.

The guy wanting me to check my facts should check his facts. There is no possible way that any commercial DVD of a movie, a TV show, or anything else is encoded at 480p. It would not play on any DVD player manufactured today. There is no 480p standard for DVDs. You cannot even author one like that.

You can tell he doesn't have a clue because he talks about "interpolating" from 480p to 480i. The term "interpolating" means "guessing by intelligent averaging". If you were going from 480p to 480i, there would no guessing or averaging involved, it would be a "simple" matter of just separating the odd and even lines and sending them one frame after another. Interpolating only comes into play when the ORIGINAL source of DVD material was interlaced and you are trying to de-interlace it. You cannot just jam the odd and even lines together because you'll get "jaggies" (jagged edges) on any objects that were moving between the frames, so you have to interpolate the missing lines in each progressive frame to avoid the jaggies.

There could be several factors involved in the result you see that earlier CSI episodes are not as good as more recent ones, but I guarantee you that it has nothing to do with any DVDs encoded at 480p. The most likely reason is that they started using hi-def cameras that don't interlace on-the-fly. The end-product DVD is still interlaced, but the original video source was non-interlaced, and therefore progressive-scan DVD players have a much easier time of re-assembling the full frames because there was no time lapse between when the odd and even lines were recorded by the camera (no jaggies). Another possibility is that the more recent episodes were encoded at a higher bitrate (less compression).

J Schey emphasizes my original point about the uselessness of these up-converting DVD players. He says that he did not see any difference between 720p and 1080i out of this player and 480p out of his Denon. I'm actually surprised that it was not worse.

If you look at the sales information on his TV, it says right there that regardless of what you send this TV, it will be up-scaled to 1080i. So if the Samsung is up-converting to 720p and sending that to the TV, then the TV is up-converting to 1080i that's two up-scaling incidents. This double up-scaling is what I was saying may actually give you worse results because the line interpolation is happening twice, and taking the average of an average is not a good idea.

Sending 1080i from the Samsung to this TV probably doesn't have the problem of double up-scaling, but my question then is "Why would you use a $150 DVD player to up-convert when you've got a multi-thousand dollar TV that most likely does a much better job of it?"