The Samsung BD-P 1600 is a Blu-ray player, on the market since spring 2009. Half a year after its release, the player's price has dropped significantly to around just 140 GBP.

• Excellent HDTV picture with 24p.
• Automatic film-mode detection for DVDs.
• Bitstream HD audio.

• Disc drive is too loud.
• Poor photo display.

All in all, the Samsung BD-P 1600 is an excellent - and cheap - Blu-ray player for entry-level users. The easy operation and speedy disc drive impressed, but the drive isn't exactly quiet, and photos play back in only mediocre quality. There could also be a few more multimedia extras.

Multimedia

The playback controls on the right-hand side are only visible when the front flap is open. Here, you can also see one of the two USB connections.

Although the 1600 has a network connection on its rear panel and even supports an optional WLAN stick, its multimedia still can't measure up to that of its two bigger brothers, the BD-P 3600 and BD-P 4610.

The network interface can only retrieve BD-Live material. Streaming of multimedia files - as is possible on the two other Samsung models - is simply beyond the BD-P 1600. Although memory chips cost almost nothing these days, the user still has to "donate" a 1-gigabyte USB stick to the player in order to use the BD-Live functions - very irritating!

Pricey: Wireless Internet requires a USB dongle, costing around 50 GBP extra.

The Korean player does, at least, play back HD camcorder videos, so long as you burn these onto a DVD in AVCHD format. Furthermore, it also accepts DivX videos, MP3s, and JPEG photos via both USB sockets. All of these files will also play back from CDs or DVDs.

Unfortunately, the photo-playback quality is poor: High-resolution photos lose quality as a result of scaling and show nasty stair-step effects. Overall, the sobering bottom line is that photo playback barely surpasses PAL resolution - it's just no fun at all!

The 17-second loading time was a pleasant surprise - in comparison with other Blu-ray players, this is decently fast, and, crucially, is achieved without using a power-hungry "Quick Start" mode. The standby power consumption is, therefore, just 0.2 watts, and the player consumes just 17.6 watts in operation.

The six bleeping buttons on the front of the device react with different pitches and melodies, and pose a question of personal taste. Once you get used to them, you can work out which buttons you've pressed from the sound alone. You can also, however, switch off the buttons and the sound. It's a cheerful feature, but nothing special.

Neither particularly attractive nor particularly dainty, the remote control is at least practical and glows in the dark.

Noisy Disc Drive:
The disc drive turns out to be irritatingly noisy, and not only while positioning its laser, but also during playback. This is the kind of thing that makes buyers with good hearing look elsewhere.

"A-B Repeat" Function:
On the positive side, the "A-B Repeat" function draws some praise - few BD players offer this function, which allows you to repeat interesting sections as often as you like. The versatile forward/reverse modes also impress - in the fastest of the six optional speeds, the Samsung searches through the video 128-times faster than normal speed - wow!

On-Screen Menu:

The menu's structure is clear and the text easily legible.

The on-screen menu also earns brownie points for its clear design, offering fuss-free operation. Here, for example, you can choose between all HDMI output resolutions, from 576i right up to 1080p.

Picture Quality

HDTV:
Relative to the BD-P 1500 predecessor model, this Samsung's picture quality shows improvements. With RGB output via HDMI the test candidate refused to display blacker-than-black (BTB) areas of the picture, which are necessary for precise brightness adjustment. In practice, however, this rarely has a negative effect on the picture. After all, most displays automatically agree with the player via HDMI to use the YUV format - in which the same error does not occur.

Samsung's technicians have also improved the de-interlacer, which now shows slight weaknesses only in particularly tricky sequences in 1080/60i format - in a close-up of a moving face, for example, the woman's eyelashes flicker. But, then, almost all players trip up here.

The HDMI frequency response for YUV-format output: perfect!

The integrated noise filter has relatively little effect, as you can see in some strongly noisy scenes in "The Fox and the Child", for example. The three-level sharpness control, on the other hand, works significantly better - less crisply produced movies profit from subtle enhancement of horizontal and vertical edges, particularly in the "Low" setting.

DVD:
In the laboratory, this small Samsung shows itself to be an extremely good DVD player: Test patterns scale particularly finely to the full HDTV resolution - this is something few players can do with the same prowess. In the practical test with DVD movies, too, the BD-P 1600 scores highly for its cinema-like picture quality. The automatic film-mode detection also functions well: Our favorite test sequence - the beach scene in "Six Days Seven Nights" - shows no flicker whatsoever. Respect!

As we're now used to, with the new Blu-ray generation, the Samsung also outputs high-definition audio formats as a bitstream via HDMI. Users without a modern AV receiver can also have the player output the sound as decoded, 7.1-channel PCM. Unlike the Panasonic DMP-BD 80, for example, the BD-P 1600 does not decode additional rear-surround channels from 5.1-channel DTS.

In the practical listening test, we could hardly tell the difference between the bitstream and PCM outputs. The listening test went differently for HD audio: The spatial differentiation, clarity of speech, and higher dynamics during explosions clearly surpass those of the compressed DTS core or of Dolby Digital sound.

As a CD player, the BD-P 1600 also makes a decent impression through its high-quality, analog, stereo output. The Korean player sounds even better, however, in collaboration with a modern receiver with an optical digital output.