Home > Consumer Reviews > Samsung BD-P3600 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player

When choosing a blu ray player, the choice can be confusing at times. After months of searching I now believe the best ones are the ones that match your needs most, after price point. Here is my review after a night well spent learning the ins and outs.

Pros-

Wifi-- This year Wifi will be all the rage. Set up with my samsung after a slight learning curve took 20 mins tops and once connected it worked flawlessy. I didn't even need to read the manuel. Superb and blazing fast!

Pandora--what a terrific gem of a music program. And its free! The learning curve is super easy and fun. I was able to program it from my mobile phone, and there it is two seconds later. I am a happy camper!

Netflix-- Great. super simple! Netflix needs more choices, but that is not Samsung's fault.

wifi dongle!- They could have charged for this. They didn't. Great!

cons, if it is one--The player feels flimsy upon first contact so that you almost want to be super gentle with it. As opposed to the sturdier players out there. If that concerns you, i suggest you hold a floor model first and decide for yourself. Also, still no hdmi plugs offered with the majority of players, this one included. Makes no sense at this point. Luckily i have spares.

Overall- a solid player, with wonderful audio and visual clarity. My test for blu ray, The Dark Knight. Looked amazing, sound oustanding. Test for upscale, Wall-E. Looked incredible and rich.

Nice job samsung!!!


UPDATE: Not sure what all the griping is about for a select few, but I watched Punisher Warzone on this player, a hard hitting film if there ever was one and this player did not hiccup. Audio and visual clarity were fantastic!! Also just watched quantum of solace. No issues. A little lag in the load time but I suspect that has to do with the dvd not the player. Sounded and looked great!! Be cautious of those few on here who get one bad lemon and decide the whole basket is rotten.

Three and a half month update: Still no problems to report with this player. I have not had one single issue with any movie I have thrown at it and I have now played over 200 films on it. it's a workhorse. It also plays copies of pretty much any DVD you have burned from a computer hard drive. I'll say it again, great product!

I've never felt so conflicted about a piece of home theater gear in my life. On the one hand, the BD-P3600 offers very good to excellent audio and video performance on DVDs and Blu-ray Discs as well as some great internet streaming features. On the other hand the "PC Streaming" feature is frustratingly hard to use and unreliable to the point that I finally gave up trying to get it to work.

A few die-hard audio/videophiles were worried when Samsung chose not to include the excellent Silicon Optix Reon HQV video processor in this year's line-up of Blu-ray Disc players. The DVD upconversion on last year's BD-P2500 was outstanding and many of us were concerned that its omission from the BD-P3600 would lead to noticeably inferior standard def performance. Turns out there was little to worry about as both the DVD and Blu-ray performance of the BD-P3600 are excellent, comparable to Panasonic's DMP-BD80 and superior to LG's BD370.

Also, with on-board decoding of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio over HDMI/PCM and multi-channel analog outputs, the audio performance and flexibility of the BD-P3600 is also excellent. Throw in the included WiFi dongle, BD-Live support, quick disc loading, Netflix online streaming and Pandora internet radio and you get one full-featured high performance Blu-ray player. That is until you try out Samsung's new PC streaming feature.

With PC streaming, you can access media files (photos, music and Divx videos) directly from a PC with shared folders on the same home network... at least in theory. When we tested this, the "automatic" feature to detect sharable PCs on the network failed entirely and we had to resort to manually providing the IP address of the PC, and even this was not reliable. This process wouldn't be such a pain except that the player does not have a "remember me" function to remember the IP address, share name, userid and password for the next connection, and entering all of this manually using the remote and on-screen graphical keyboard is a time-consuming process. Also, we found that the player hung on multiple occasions while attempting to playback AVIs from the networked PC, and the only way to recover from this was a re-boot (which, of course, forgot all of our network information). Meanwhile, playback of the same content from a USB flash drive connected to the player's front or rear USB port, worked reliably, without all the drama.

As a Blu-ray Disc and DVD player, the BD-P3600 performs very well. It is one of the fastest players to load up both standard DVDs and Blu-ray Discs (faster, in most cases, than even the PS3). Also, the Pandora and Netflix streaming features are very reliable and add quite a bit to the overall flexibility and versatility of the player. But Samsung really should have waited to release the PC streaming feature until it was more robust and more reliable. If you promise not to use this feature, then I'd happily recommend the BD-P3600 as a full-featured high performance Blu-ray and DVD player. But those who do want to take advantage of PC streaming are in for some serious frustration.

A full review is available at Big Picture Big Sound (dot com).

I differ with the first reviewer and am very satisfied with the player. It does a beautiful job of playing Blu-Ray disks and the image is immaculate as is the audio (the primary reason for buying any player). Netflix stream is great (it also streams in HD where the content is available - much nicer than the image on a PC), Pandora internet radio is a bonus.
I had no trouble connecting to my network. It was very easy and by putting my media into a shared (public) folder there was no complicated set up. I agree that this aspect of the player is a work in progress - codec support seems spotty - some played, some did not. Samsung has always done a great job of supporting their products (I've owned printers, TV's, etc.), so I expect further improvements.
My conclusion is that if what you want is a great Blu-Ray player with good networking and excellent audio then this IS the player. If you primarily want streaming of computer files to your TV, then a PC attached to the TV is a better solution (I have one of those too).

Wireless access to Netflix was my key criteria when I started looking for my first Blu-ray player. Once I read CNET's statement that this unit was a huge leap ahead, I was sold.

I bought and connected it to my new Samsung UN46B7100, both of which I bought at Best Buy. Connecting it to my wireless network went smoothly. I put in The Matrix on DVD. It looked as good as a DVD could look. That is, it looked good until it froze up. After several attempts, I restarted the player and put in a new Blu-ray disc. Fifteen minutes later it froze. Samsung customer support quickly recommended that I return the player. Best Buy exchanged it.

Unit 2 had the same issue. Best Buy suggested I try a different brand and mentioned that another customer had returned 3 units. I wasn't ready to give up, and I took unit 3 home. It only seemed prudent that I give it a thorough testing. It played DVDs, Blu-rays, and streaming Netflix films for 12 hours. During that time I noticed that the audio was slightly behind the video, which was especially pronounced in concert footage. Customer support had me change various setting to no avail. In hour 13 the player froze up just as the others had. I gave up. I returned the unit and took home an LG B390. I've had it playing for 24 hours and it has performed excellently.

I have 2 suggestions for anyone reading this: thoroughly test any player and be aware that CNET doesn't review units that it buys in stores. Manufacturers send them units for testing, and you can be sure that those units aren't lemons.

As of May 31, 2009 there is no firmware update for this player that solves compatibility issues with lots of disks. While some disks will play fine, others will freeze at random points and then skip back to some point earlier in the movie. I have seen the problem with all of my Star Trek season 1 disks but I have now read reports of other titles having the same issue. The disks in question work fine in my Panasonic player so I know I'm not dealing with a bad disk issue. There are lots of other people seeing this problem with this and other Samsung players - just google for "samsung bd-p3600 freeze"