Well I recevied the Samsung BD-UP5000 HD-DVD and Blu-Ray player this morning on New Years Eve.
I had a friend in the US ship me one over, it was on pre-order since Oct ‘06, finally 4 days ago the order was filled. It seems Best Buy in the states got them first and progressively through the last 2 weeks of December Circuit City, ABT started receiving stock although this is still a soft release from Samsung as they are to be officially released mid Jan early Feb.
Eager to try it out, I opened the box and saw the power cable obviously had US pins which made me remember that I needed a step down transformer to power the player up, as in NZ we use 240v power. The BD-UP5000 does not have a universal power supply and only accepts 110V, bummer! I looked at my watch time was 3:45pm, Jaycar electronics closes at 5pm, plenty of time to rush out and grab one, I went and purchased a 50watt 240V to 110V transformer. I assumed I was well within the power consumption rating of the BD-UP5000 as it said 43watts on the back panel of the player. Once back home I connected the Bd-UP5000 up via HDMI to my Integra 8.8 (more about this upgrade later) plugged in the transformer and fired it up.
After a bit of HDMI handshaking, up came the Samsung screen, I checked the settings out via the menu I checked and setup my video and audio options. I then popped in the Transformers HD-DVD, the tray closed the BD-UP5000 said loading and then it shutdown and went into standby with the power button glowing red. I though WTF! Turned it back on but it would turn on attempt to spin up the disc since it was already in there and then go into standby again. I started to think something was wrong with the new BD-UP5000, I tried many times with the same result, eventually it ejected the disc after leaving it for a while, however it did the same with a Blu-ray disc. I though about it for a while and then thought maybe it is not getting enough power from the transformer when it comes time to spin up the discs as more juice it required to do this. The transformer may not be able to supply the extra power required to spin up the discs even though the requirement maybe for a short time, hence the BD-UP5000 shuts down.
To test this theory I went and grabbed my 25Watt transformer that was powering my clock, connected it up and sure enough the BD-UP5000 doens’t even get to attempt to start the disc spinning before it shuts down again. Damn the transformer I got wasn’t providing the required power, will need to change it but the store had closed by that time and the next day was New Years day!
New Years day came and went, and I went out the next day even though it’s a public holiday Jaycar were open to change the 50w transformer to this 120w one much better build quality and it is encased in metal and is an isolating transformer much safer. That worked flawlessly with the BD-UP5000, saw my first HD-DVD movie Transformers was excellent the 1080p HD quality picture was unbelievable and the sound was the same. However there are some shortcomings of the BD-UP5000 which I will explain in a later post.
