Samsung DVD-HR 757

Author's product rating:   

Picture Playback
Sound Level	Good
Ease of Use
Range of Features
Value for Money	Good

Advantages:	Full - Speed USB Mass Storage support, large HDD
Disadvantages:	flaws in DivX playback, slow startup, menus, copy, stupid 'features'

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Well-featured yet easy to use. I use it with a regular TV, so I do not know much about HDMI, DTS sound and all that tech stuff, but it sure
has lots of input and output sockets. :)

My favourite feature is USB host capability: Plug in your USB Mass Storage, and play your DivX movies right away.

It has some software 'features' or bugs ('this is by design') that are just simply not clever.

Pros(+):
- intuitive menus and functions, easy to navigate through.
- large hard disk (320gigs), 130 hours at normal quality
- remote controller cooperates with Samsung televisions
- can handle most USB mass storage devices, and play/record movies on it.
- full speed USB2.0 support
- you may watch DVD/HDD while recording
- automatic power-off: you may choose that the recorder automatically goes to sleep after 2 or 8 hours of inactivity. This feature is off by default.

Cons(-):
-DivX playback has minor problems: screen often flickers here and there, sometimes even audio has minor popping noises, depends on encoding. Not too serious, but this is not what I expected from a flagship model, and from previous experience from the cheapo Samsung P355 player, which plays DivX OK. Hopefully Samsung will release a firmware upgrade later.
- slow when navigating through menus, changing channels, and power-on sequence is a pain (about 25 sec).
- disturbingly bright blue power-on indicator LED
- vibration caused by HDD, one has to apply isolation layer between unit and surface to prevent noise.
- copy from DVD/USB to HDD speed: about 1.5-2Mbytes/sec, might be a chipset-bottleneck?
- during playback, you can switch back to TV with a press of a button. During copying, you may not. Strange, because copying takes a lot of time, and all you can do is watch the progress indicator.
- timed recording will only start when unit in stand-by mode
a strange side-effect to this: when timed recording already started, you may turn on the recorder and have your dvd played. However, you cannot put it back to standby again while recording. So if you have two timed recording following each other, the second one will not start. I just cannot figure out why it is so: on my Philips VCR, you may put the unit back to standby without effecting the timed recording.

- when changing channel frequency, it will blank the channel's name, one has to type it in again