Samsung DVD-HD950

With the addition of an extra room added onto my house, I then had to think long and hard what to put in that room, and thus may of this year, I went out and bought a 65 inch HD ready plasma TV - however, enough with the bragging, on to my article.

Because of its shear size, I thought I now needed proper a/v equipment that would do it justice, so I went out and bought several new bits and bobs. One such piece was the Samsung DVD-950 DVD player.

The motive behind my purchase was that the Samsung is one of many new DVD players which use a piece of technology called up scaling. This is where they use a high def ready TV's HDMI input to offer improved quality for all of your old DVDs.

So anyway, I thought I would give this a try, and so I plugged in and set up my new layer (which was very simple, though that may be because I am a veteran of Samsung DVD players) and played star wars episode three through it to see if I can spot the improvement, I even had another DVD player playing in sync on another channel so that I could multi-pip them to see if I can see the benefits of the up scaling.

This is where I found that the DVD950's video quality was disappointing, which completely overshadowed any benefits I was getting from the upscale conversion. And that was disappointing to say the least.

However, I will say something for the little thing. It was a very chic and slim line design, it had many extra and good features (such as being able to manipulate the size of the output, which helped me make use of the full screen) and the remote control was very simple to use, if possibly a little over crowed.

For the price (which i forgot to mention was £170), and that's the main thing to consider here, I would not go for the player, simply because you would be better of with a standard DVD player, because of that lacking quality. However, it did have a good range of features and even though I sent it back and bought a new one (the review f which to come later) if you don't have a good eye for detail then you may want to consider the Samsung.