Samsung's first Blu-ray player reports of faulty chip

At least some of Samsung's first generation BDP-1000 Blu-ray players have a faulty noise reduction chip, if reports around the Net are true.

There have been complaints about the quality of Blu-ray content - I don't know if this has anything to do with those complaints.

Apparently Sony brought the attention to Samsung when it noticed that the BD-P1000's playback didn't match the quality of the master tapes used to encode the disc.

"Samsung engineers later determined that "the noise-reduction circuit in the player"s Genesis scaler chip was enabled, causing the picture to soften significantly."

Samsung have apparently confirmed that there is a problem that they're working to fix. Fortunately it looks as if this can be solved with a downloadable firmware upgrade.

This isn't really a surprise - it's just another case of first-release equipment having teething troubles. Frustrating, but that's often the price you pay for being a guinea pig (early adopter).

Read