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Samsung's giant cube Blu-ray HTIB

Samsung's newly announced HT-D7100 fits an entire Blu-ray home theater system into a single large cube enclosure.

Matthew Moskovciak Senior Associate Editor / Reviews - Home theater
Covering home audio and video, Matthew Moskovciak helps CNET readers find the best sights and sounds for their home theaters. E-mail Matthew or follow him on Twitter @cnetmoskovciak.
Matthew Moskovciak
2 min read
Samsung HT-D7100
Samsung HT-D7100 Samsung
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LAS VEGAS--All-in-one home theater systems are often called home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB) systems, but we've never seen one where the home theater is a box.

Samsung's newly announced HT-D7100 Blu-ray home theater design features a unique cubelike design, shunning separate speakers and components for a single large enclosure. The early press photos aren't clear enough to tell exactly how the HT-D7100 works, but we'll take a hands-on look tomorrow on the show floor and update this story.

The HT-D7100 is a 2.1 system, which means it contains a built-in subwoofer, and it features 110 watts of total power. Samsung is also offering a sound-processing mode called "3D Sound Plus"; we don't have many details on what that means yet, but we'll update this blog if we get more information.

The HT-D7100's Blu-ray features are similar to other high-end Blu-ray players Samsung is showing at CES 2011. It's 3D compatible and also has built-in 2D-to-3D conversion processing. Of course, most 3D TVs we've reviewed last year can also convert 2D content to 3D, but it will provide buyers with another option for 2D-to-3D video processing.

The HT-D7100 also has built-in Wi-Fi and can access Samsung Apps, which opens up a wide variety of streaming media services, including Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Pandora, Blockbuster, and Twitter. New for 2011 is Samsung's Smart Hub, which is a unified search feature that looks through all of the streaming media services for content and also to make viewing recommendations. Of course, that's what Google TV promises, too (and didn't quite deliver), so we're eager to see how Smart Hub works in practice. It's also DLNA-compliant, so you can stream your personal music, photos, and videos from a connected PC.

CES: Samsung's funky home theater designs (photos)

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Samsung also has a new "1-foot connection" feature for Wi-Fi connectivity, which allows you to connect to your router without using a password if the device is within a foot of the router. One-foot connection only works with compatible Samsung routers, however.

Samsung says pricing will be announced closer to the release date, and right now there's no specific release date except "first half 2011."