Samsung BD-C5500

Performance

Blu-ray image quality
Like the step-up BD-C6900, the BD-C5500's Blu-ray image quality is in the top tier of players we've reviewed this year. It passed all our program material tests and the majority of test patterns we threw at it, indicating that it should provide pristine playback on nearly every Blu-ray you subject it to. Only the most dedicated videophiles will appreciate the minute benefits offered by our image quality king, the Oppo BDP-83.

All our testing was conducted via HDMI at 1080p. If your display supports and correctly handles 24 frames-per-second output (also known as 24p), you can largely ignore these tests as we find all players to have virtually identical performance.

Blu-ray image quality: test patterns

The BD-C5500 was a strong performer on our test pattern suite, passing all of the most important patterns, including the film resolution and video resolution tests. The BD-C5500 also did better than expected on the cadence tests, passing seven out of eight cadences, although we'd stress that it's rare any cadence other than 3:2 is used on actual program material. The BD-C5500 did fail a test with text overlaid on film — the text looked fine, but there were comb-like artefacts in the background — but it's not something we ended up seeing in program material.

Blu-ray image quality: program material

Ultimately, performance with program material is all that really matters and the BD-C5500 passed all our program material tests. Standard film-based movies like Ghost Rider and Mission: Impossible III (M:I:III) looked crisp, without any moiré in sight. We've seen some players, such as the Sony BDP-S570, having minor issues with video-based titles, but the BD-C5500 handled Tony Bennett: American Classic and Nine Inch Nails (NIN) Live: Beside You in Time perfectly. Our reference Oppo BDP-83 did pass a few extra test patterns and has more image-tweaking options than the BD-C5500, but the truth is both players are going to have nearly identical image quality on the vast majority of movies.

Blu-ray operational speed (in seconds)

We were surprised to find the BD-C5500 to be such a sluggish Blu-ray player, especially considering the flagship BD-C6900 was one of the fastest players we've tested this year. The good news is the BD-C5500 is pretty speedy if you already have the player turned on and you're watching a movie with basic menus, like Mission: Impossible III, which loaded in a quick 11.23 seconds. However, if the player was off, the load time would spike to 29.74 seconds, almost twice as slow as the step-up BD-C6900. The BD-C5500 was also pretty pokey with movies having more complex menus, like Spider-Man 3 and our chapter skip test, which indicated overall operational sluggishness. While the BD-C5500 is still faster than the PS3 Slim, it's the slowest stand-alone Blu-ray player we've tested this year.

DVD performance

The BD-C5500 performed well with our suite of DVD tests. Test patterns were a breeze for the Samsung, acing traditional tests like Film Resolution, but also passing eight out of eight cadence tests, which means it should handle relatively uncommon program material well. Most importantly, the BD-C5500 passed all our program tests, which wasn't a surprise considering its test pattern performance. As always, we felt the Oppo BDP-83 looked subjectively better when flipping between the two, but the difference was relatively subtle and only real home theatre enthusiasts would notice the difference.

Power consumption

Unlike some other new Blu-ray players, the BD-C5500 lacks a quick-start mode and therefore by default uses very little power in standby mode. While we didn't mind the lack of a quick-start feature on the step-up BD-C6900 — since it's speedy booting up without quick start — the feature was missed more on the BD-C5500, which was relatively slow to boot-up. We would have preferred the option to use a little more juice to reduce the initial boot-up time.

Via CNET US