Since the Blu-ray format has won the format war, a variety of consumer electronics manufacturers have scrambled to come up with their own standalone Blu-ray players, which would fill the gap left by HD DVD machines. Quite obviously, one of the respective companies has been Korean giant Samsung, who launched back in the first half of 2008 the BD-P2500 player, a standalone player capable of delivering an extensive level of versatility to all of its users.



The player supports some of the most popular playback formats, including here VC-1, MPEG2 and H.264. Plus, it's compatible with BD profile and is BD-Live 2.0 ready, which means that users will be able to access quite easily the bonus content available for certain movie titles released in Blu-ray format.



Another very important selling point of the BD-P2500 is the fact that it provides Netflix support right out the box. Practically, users can stream movies instantly to their TVs from the internet via Samsung's player, without requiring a computer in order to do so.



As expected, beside all the BD discs one could think of, the player also supports a wide range of other disc formats, including here BD-ROM, BD-RE, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, AVCHD and Audio CD. Plus, it also upconverts DVD movies to near-HD quality, which means that you won't have to throw away your huge movie collection.



The BD-P2500 offers some pretty impressive audio features as well, since it supports the new Dolby Digital Plus Audio format. It also supports uncompressed PCM Audio and Legacy dts 5.1 Dolby Digital, plus Dolby TrueHD.



The connectivity options provided by Samsung's Blu-ray player are specifically designed in order to cater for pretty much all of the user's needs. Hence, we're talking about the usual HDMI (ver. 1.3), Component and Composite Video outputs, accompanied by USB 2.0 and Ethernet interfaces (used for SW upgrade only). Additionally, the device also sports an optical digital audio output, plus a 7.1-channel analog audio connector.



The Samsung BD-P2500 Blu-ray player sells for around 350 – 400 US dollars, which has become quite a standard price point for this type of advanced players and can't really be considered that high, given the numerous features it can provide.