The information below may not be new to most here, but the source of the comments is certainly surprising.

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No-difference in quality from Blu-ray players

3:06AM, Friday 9th January 2009

No-difference in quality from Blu-ray players

Samsung has said that all Blu-ray players with support for the same audio and video standards, output the same-quality video and audio when using an HDMI cable. The reason for this is that digital video and audio is read from the disc and passed digitally to the display or AV receiver over HDMI. This results in an identical output from budget and high-end players alike.

"Last year we had two kinds of Blu-ray player: a basic and a step-up model," said Dr. Dongho Shin, senior VP for Samsung's visual display division. "Only the step-up model has 7.1 analogue outputs."

In this case, the difference here is for people that want to use Blu-ray's advanced audio formats, such as DTS-MA, but don't have an AV receiver capable of decoding it.

While this may differentiate Samsung's products, it's harder to do so against its competition, as the video and audio quality will be the same. Shin believes that the main reason to choose one manufacturer is the extra services that they build into the players, such as support for the Pandora streaming media service in Samsung's Blu-ray players.

This is a situation that's likely to change in the future, as the majority of TV manufacturers exhibiting at CES 2009 have announced televisions with built-in network ports, so that they can access streaming content from the internet.

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