Samsung BD-D6900 3D Blu-ray player and DVR combo
Does it all and then some
Review Samsung’s BD-D6900 3D Blu-ray player is a curious hybrid. Not only does it play Blu-rays, DVDs and CDs but it also has a Freeview HD DVB-T2 tuner and connects to the company’s new Smart TV apps portal. It will even double up as a PVR if you tether it to an external hard drive. It’s not so much a disc spinner as an entertainment centre for mid-morning (rather than early) adopters.
Play it again...Samsung – the BD-D6900 ticks an awful lot of boxes
The BD-D6900 is slim. Just 33mm tall on tippy toes, the thing has barely enough fat to accommodate back-panel connections. Bear in mind that ‘slimness’ is not synonymous with ‘designer,’ even if that’s what Samsung would like you to think.
Indeed, the build quality of the BD-D6900 is best described as slight. The top of the unit is finished with what appears to be a recycled biscuit tin. Needless to say, it’s not comparable with some of Samsung’s higher-end products.
Connectivity includes an HDMI 1.4 output, RF loopthrough, component and phono AV out, optical digital audio and Ethernet LAN. If you don’t wish to use a wired network connection, there’s also integrated Wi-Fi. Front and centre is a drop-down touch sensitive display, and to the right, behind a pull-down flap lurk USB and CI CAM slots.
A decent array of connectivity – Wi-Fi is built-in
All the BD-D6900’s functionality is accessed from a graphically rich menu. You can dial up the Smart Hub interface (from the Internet icon), stream sound and vision files from across your network or USB device (using My Devices), and fine tune the configuration from the Settings menu. The TV guide EPG is large and clear, with a live TV window top left.
Next page: Flash plug-in support?
COMMENTS
Simple question
I wish reviewers would ask one simple questions. Is it multi-region? If the answer is no, then I'm not interested in anything else it does since I won't buy it. If it is multi-region then I'm interested in the rest of the review. Since I'm a Brit who recently moved to the US, this is a complete deal breaker. All my existing DVD/Blu-Ray collection is region encoded for Europe, but any new things I buy will be region encoded for the US. The region encoding is one of the most irritating and pointless things the industry ever did.
Win Win Win Fail...
It all sounded so good until the detail was exposed..
I'd love a device that could record direct to my medfia servers network share, so that I could watch my recordings elsewhere, say the TV in the bedroom. Though they'd need to be in the 'old fashioned' style you know without drm.. like the good ole VHS days.
Wifi = Win
Remote Record = Win /USB only = Fail
HD freeview = Win / 1 Tuner = Fail
Apps = Win / No iPlayer = Fail
DLNA Media = Win / Crappy implementaion = Fail
BluRay =Win / Poor DVD upscale = FAIL (need to change HDMI Res each time you change disk so the TV will upscale instead?)
Far too many fails to make it worthwhile.
ALL Bluray players are region locked
"I wish reviewers would ask one simple questions. Is it multi-region?"
For Bluray players, the answer is dead simple: IT IS NOT. Region lockout is a mandatory part of Bluray's DRM system. Bluray's DRM is very draconian (=tough to break), so NO company in the world is going to risk and go with a reversed engineered version, like many chinese companies did with DVD (which has an easy to crack DRM). So, you can bet your car that every Bluray player in the market implement region lockout.
If you want a multi-region player, just get an MKV player that has a USB port and NTFS/EXT3 support , and then rip all your blurays to MKV files with the help of AnyDVD HD and RipBot264. or by a media center PC and install AnyDVD HD on it.
Bad.
WTF no DivxHD/MKV support? Isn't LG supposed to offer this feature in their bluray players since forever? How many years does Samsung need in order to catch up with the rest of the industry? And a nonperfect- USB implementation in 2011? Are there guys serious?
Yeah its got a TV tuner that's rendered unusable by the draconian DRM, but the rest of the package is unimpressive. This is why i don't buy Samsung. They look good on the first look, but if you look closer... not so good.
Network recording
Most of these devices will only record HD content locally due to DRM issues. You can't be certified for Freeview HD or Freesat HD without implementing some fairly draconian DRM. Even if they allowed you to record to the network, you wouldn't be able to play the file back on anything else. I've tried taking the disk off my C-class Samsung TV and reading it, but the file is nonsense to any of the players I tried.
That said, my 2010 TV seems a bit better at DLNA playback than this 2011 BD player. Maybe a step back for Samsung there? I've yet to have any compatibility problems, but then I am streaming from a PC and the software I use (serviio) has Samsung as its primary target platform.
