With the high-def format war between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD finally relegated to the past, the makers of Blu-ray players have been able to concentrate on smoothing out the rocky path that early adopters encountered with some of the first models. The days when you couldn't just assume that a given player would play your old CDs (let alone some of your new Blu-ray Discs!) might finally be gone. The good news is that the manufacturers are now focusing on adding features, lowering prices, and eliminating the various compatibility issues that cropped up with some discs on certain players.

Even though it dabbled in making dual-format Blu-ray/HD DVD players, Samsung has always been one of Blu-ray's strongest supporters, and with the BD-P1500, it's now on its fourth generation of standalone machines. Originally designed to share its basic architecture with the company's planned second-gen dual-format player, the BD-P1500 has some telltale empty spaces on its video board where the HD DVD circuitry would have been if that version hadn't been deep-sixed along with the entire HD DVD format.

Smaller and lighter than any Blu-ray player preceding it, the BD-P1500 is one of the first I've encountered that doesn't have a cooling fan. Its sleek, black acrylic front panel has only a bare minimum of controls, including ones for power and tray load, and a four-way button to operate the basic transport functions. Everything else is handled using the remote control and the player's onscreen menus. The remote is similar to others that Samsung has provided in the past, with a button layout that I found to be refreshingly logical and intuitive. Even though a few of the buttons do glow in the dark, a proper backlight would have been a welcome addition.

BD-Live (a.k.a. Profile 2.0) Blu-ray players are finally starting to appear. (Panasonic's new DMP-BD50 is a Profile 2.0 model, while a software update that Sony made available last March bumps the PlayStation 3 up to 2.0.) But the Samsung foregoes that profile's Internet-based features in favor of the now-mandatory Bonus View (a.k.a. Profile 1.1). This typically means that the player can enable the picture-in-picture features provided on compatible discs, along with an associated commentary.

The BD-P1500 also includes onboard decoding for the Dolby Digital Plus and TrueHD formats, although curiously not for DTS-HD Master Audio. Samsung says Master Audio decoding will become available in a future firmware upgrade. For now, however, you'll need to deliver those signals in bitstream format to a suitably equipped A/V receiver over the player's HDMI 1.3 connection. With only a 2-channel analog output provided on the player, you will absolutely need an HDMI digital-audio-capable receiver to experience these new high-rez audio formats in full surround, although regular Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks can still be passed through the Samsung's TOSlink optical output. The player can also downsample the digital output if your surround processor can't decode a 96-kHz PCM signal.

SETUP

I used an HDMI cable to connect the BD-P1500 to an Integra DTR-8.8 receiver, and I had no problem playing all of the various audio formats, either by using the player's onboard decoding or by sending out a bitstream signal so the receiver could decode the high-rez soundtrack. The audio setup menu gives you three basic options for the digital-audio output format. The main catch is that only the setting called Bitstream Audiophile lets you send a native DTS-HD Master Audio signal to your receiver, although this setting won't allow you to hear the picture-in-picture commentary track on Blu-ray Discs with Bonus View features. Sure, you can always go back into the menu and change the output option when needed, but that could easily become one of those little things that results in some head-scratching.

The Samsung's video setup is pretty basic, with none of the picture or noise-reduction adjustments you find on some other players. Other than basic output-resolution and aspect-ratio settings, there's a 24-frame-per-second (fps) film-mode option that eliminates the need for 2:3 pulldown processing — as long as you're using a TV that can accept a 24-fps signal and display it at a multiple of that frame rate. The HDMI output can also carry Samsung's Anynet+ CEC control signals, which allow you to hide the player in a cabinet and still operate it from a Samsung TV's remote.

PERFORMANCE

Before I started performing any of our video torture tests, I used the BD-P1500 to simply play movies for a while. And I found that, for the most part, it behaved well, with few of the frustrating problems that plagued some earlier players. At no point did I encounter a disc that wouldn't play at all, stopped halfway through, or locked up the Samsung player. Load times were generally fast, although some of the discs were sluggish. For example, a Bonus View disc like Sunshine took an agonizing 2 minutes and 16 seconds to load the menu screen, while my favorite quick-loading disc, A Clockwork Orange, was up and rolling in 35 seconds.

Once Sunshine was playing, I found that the Bonus View features worked seamlessly. Pressing a button in the bottom right corner of the remote brought up a small window with behind-the-scenes footage about how the film was made, along with accompanying commentary. That's certainly a step up from regular DVD commentary tracks where everyone just keeps saying how great each actor is as they appear onscreen.

Picture quality was hard to fault, with the Samsung delivering crisp detail, deep and noise-free blacks, and accurate color rendition. I did catch just a hint of moiré effects in the buildings at the start of Chapter 15 of Mission: Impossible III, although it was far less obvious than I've seen in the past with some other players. No Country for Old Men looked especially impressive, with exceptional delineation in the subtle hues of the desert landscapes.

Loading up the Blu-ray version of the Silicon Optix HD HQV Benchmark disc, I saw some flickering on both the Video and Film Resolution Loss test patterns, and just a hint of stair-step artifacts during the diagonal-filter Jaggies tests. Having said that, both the Film Resolution Loss test showing a slow pan across an empty stadium and the HD Noise Test showing a sailboat at sunset looked superb.

Using the regular DVD version of the same tests with the BD-P1500's video output set for 1080p over HDMI, the images looked smooth and were relatively noise-free, although it seemed like the player occasionally glossed over some of the finest details. Subtleties in both the fine brickwork from the Flag test and the grass in the bridge scene looked a bit smoothed out and lacking in definition. With no user-selectable noise-reduction controls, it's hard to tell exactly what the player was doing to the image — although setting its video output to 480i and using the HQV Reon processor in the Integra receiver to perform high-def upconversion resulted in a slight but clear improvement in picture detail. It's important to understand that these test images are carefully engineered to delineate tiny differences. Under regular movie-viewing conditions, the BD-P1500's picture always looked excellent.

BOTTOM LINE

As someone who has essentially zero interest in gaming, I'm frustrated that the leading Blu-ray player up to this point has essentially been a hijacked videogame console. Most earlier standalone Blu-ray players couldn't match the PS3's performance, or they cost so much that they failed to deliver good value. Now, with the Samsung BD-P1500, we finally have a "real" Blu-ray player that can deliver outstanding performance at an affordable price. No, it doesn't have interactive BD-Live capability, but to many people (myself included), those features are of minor importance next to things like basic video performance and disc handling — areas where the BD-P1500 excels. While the inclusion of DTS-HD Master Audio decoding and multichannel analog outputs would have certainly widened its appeal, when paired with the right receiver, those omissions become irrelevant. In some ways, the BD-P1500 shows us that Blu-ray has finally come of age.