My Wife, Vicky recently bought a Samsung Blu Ray player from Circuit City while they were going out of business here in Rochester, NY. Along with the player she bought a few cool titles to accompany it. The Shining, 3:10 to Yuma, and The last X-Files movie. I was very excited and pretty psyched about it. Even when she told me that the player was THE last one they had and was a display model.

You see we have had a PS3 for a couple of years now and we love it. We belong to Gamefly and Netflix and we use the PS3 for watching and playing the movies and games. We haven’t had a standalone DVD player in the living room for some time now. I wanted a standalone blu ray player since they do upconvert the standard 480 output and the blu rays look great. Most importantly I didn’t want to burn out the PS3 which was working overtime.

I must say though that after buying an HDMI switcher (my TV has only 1 input, I know, time for an upgrade!) and splitting the 2 sources between the PS3 and the blu ray, I was a bit apprehensive. It was true what I had read about the Samsung player. It is slow as shit. Sorry about the vivid description but it IS very slow. Slow loading, slow controls and slow responses.

I downloaded some Firmware upgrades to CD from Samsung’s Firmware page and installed them on the player but it still seemed very slow to me. It took The Dark Knight like 5 minutes to get loaded! No Kidding. I do nitpick though. After I broke the player in it did seem to get a bit faster but never as fast as the PS3 performs.

I did connect my blu ray player to my Receiver via HDMI and Optical out and still use it regularly when I watch some new titles from Netflix or some older ones from my collection like KING KONG or IRON MAN. In this regard the Samsung does perform well despite the sluggishness. But continued gameplay and the occasional standard DVD is still played in the PS3. Even some blu rays that I watch with the 7.1 turned off (and just listen to it on the TV audio speakers) I still rely on that workhorse of the blu ray players that were done right. The Sony Playstation 3.