CES 2008

Samsung's budget BD-P1500 has a relatively strong feature set for the price.

(Credit: Samsung)

Samsung has been one of the most aggressive manufacturers in the Blu-ray market, releasing the very first player, the BD-P1000, and then following it up with the BD-P1200 and the BD-P1400 relatively quickly. The BD-P1500 is the next product in the line, and it looks to be an incremental improvement on the mostly well-reviewed BD-P1400. One of the biggest upgrades is that it's Blu-ray Profile 1.1 compliant, which means it can play back the "picture-in-picture" features available on some new Blu-ray discs coming out this year. The other important upgrade is soundtrack support, as the BD-P1500 has onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, plus the ability to output those soundtracks in bitstream format. Most importantly, we're hoping the BD-P1500 irons out some of the operational quirks we noticed on the BD-P1400, including an annoying pause with certain discs. The BD-P1500 will be available in May 2008, and pricing is currently unavailable. If Samsung can get the BD-P1500 around $300, we expect it will be popular with early adopters looking to go Blu after the news of Warner Bros. Entertainment becoming a Blu-ray exclusive studio.