Should I buy this thing or wait and see what Black Friday brings, or get the new one from Panasonic?
Also, has anyone reported issues connected this to an Onkyo AVR? My Samsung HD-906 upscaler has issues with my Onkyo AVR where the picture and sound drop intermittently.
I have had this unit for a few months now, and it is excellent. To be BD Live enabled, you need to keep at least a 1 GB USB stick plugged into the back. The only issue I have is when playing Bonusview picture in picture in its bitstream audiophile mode, the secondary audio does not play - this can be "fixed" by switching to PCM output, but obviously, I would prefer not to switch. This player matches VERY well with Onkyo HDMI receivers - I can speak from experience (I have an 806). If your receiver has HDMI and supports the latests DD and DTS formats, you switch the 1500 to its Bitstream Audiophile mode, and you are all set (besides the one mentioned bug which I have reported to Samsung Tech-hopefully to be fixed in a future firmware update)
There is no way around this 'issue' because current HDMI standard only transmit one audio stream to AVR. Maybe in the future of HDMI 3.0, we will have multiple audio stream from player to AVR. Then, you can have your PiP audio and bitstream on at the same time.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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$235 on Amazon.
Should I buy this thing or wait and see what Black Friday brings, or get the new one from Panasonic?
Also, has anyone reported issues connected this to an Onkyo AVR? My Samsung HD-906 upscaler has issues with my Onkyo AVR where the picture and sound drop intermittently.
I have had this unit for a few months now, and it is excellent. To be BD Live enabled, you need to keep at least a 1 GB USB stick plugged into the back.
The only issue I have is when playing Bonusview picture in picture in its bitstream audiophile mode, the secondary audio does not play - this can be "fixed" by switching to PCM output, but obviously, I would prefer not to switch.
This player matches VERY well with Onkyo HDMI receivers - I can speak from experience (I have an 806). If your receiver has HDMI and supports the latests DD and DTS formats, you switch the 1500 to its Bitstream Audiophile mode, and you are all set (besides the one mentioned bug which I have reported to Samsung Tech-hopefully to be fixed in a future firmware update)
Diamond204,
Re: PiP audio with Bitstream audio.
There is no way around this 'issue' because current HDMI standard only transmit one audio stream to AVR. Maybe in the future of HDMI 3.0, we will have multiple audio stream from player to AVR. Then, you can have your PiP audio and bitstream on at the same time.