Up close to Cameron's creations you can make out the intricate textures of skin and scales, while epic shots of Pandora's landscapes look equally crisp, with stable detail and emphatic edges. nowhere is this more apparent than with Avatar on Blu-ray, which looks beautiful through the BD-D8500's eyes. Less impressive, however, are the occasionally sluggish menus and the pain-in-the-neck process of entering text into Smart Hub's dialogue boxes using the hit-and-miss predictive text on the remote, but thankfully, things get easier as it remembers passwords and previous searches.ĭisc loading times are pretty nifty and at the end of that wait are some dazzling pictures, packed with detail and painted in deep and naturallooking colours. We love what Samsung has done with the main menu, using full-colour cartoony graphics and an even clearer menu layout than last year's machines.

The results aren't great with TV, but give it a BD such as Iron Man 2 and it lends a fairly convincing sense of depth to the image. But Samsung has also added 2D to 3D conversion to this year's players, which not only works with Blu-ray discs but also programmes from the Freeview tuner. With so much else going on, it's easy to forget that the BD-D8500 is also a pretty nifty Blu-ray deck too, the highlight of its spec sheet being 3D playback. Playing: To be expected as it has an HDTV PVR built inĪnalogue: Far exceeds our expectations, considering that it has no audiophile pretensionsĭisc loading & Java: A comparatively fast disc loader Idling: Not as low as many budget players Power consumption (Watts): Idle: 18W Playing: 18W The versatile onscreen info banner also lets you look ahead in the schedules without having to consult the full EPG.Įlsewhere, it does all the usual Freeview HD tricks, including lightning-quick digital text access, audio description and subtitles. The 500GB HDD gives you 120hrs of HD recordings, or 240hrs of SD, plus the great-looking eight-day EPG and series link prevent you missing your favourite shows. Sadly, though, only one of the tuners is linked to the hard disk, which means you can't record two channels simultaneously. Turning our attention to the Freeview feature list, the BD-D8500 does almost everything you'd expect from a twin-tuner PVR, most importantly allowing you to pause/rewind live TV and record one channel while recording another.

This recommends movies available on VOD services (at the moment, just LOVEFiLM) based on your viewing history and ratings. To complement these apps, there's another nifty feature – Your Video.

Samsung 2d to 3d conversion depth