>>Hey, I'm Matthew Moskovciak, Senior Associate Editor at CNET.com and we're here with here with the Samsung BDC-6900. This is Samsung's flagship 3D Blu-ray player and currently has a street price of about $360. As you can see, the design is pretty slick and if you look at the top of the player, you'll see there's a transparent window to see the spinning disc drive to kind of emphasize the player's 3D capabilities. Luckily, you can turn off all that illumination on top in the settings menu so it's not lighting up in your home theatre all the time. If you turn the player on you'll be able to see that Samsung has completely redesigned the user interface and we actually liked it a lot. There's a wood grained background and there's big, colorful icons and it's easier to get to a lot of the streaming services right off the main menu.
If you click on the Internet At TV icon you'll go into Samsung's new Samsung apps platform. What that means is that developers are going to be able to create new programs as time goes on for the player so you can add functionality that didn't exist when you bought it. Now, we don't know how well this whole new Samsung apps platform is going to off, however, there's already a lot of great streaming services on the player such as Netflix, VUDU, Pandora and YouTube so you're pretty much set as it is already. If you look around back you'll be able to checkout the connectivity. Now, there's all the standard ports such as an HDMI output, digital audio output but the big step up is the 7.1 analog outputs which are really important because this is a 3D Blu-ray player. What that means is that you'll be able to run 3D video over the HDMI output straight to a 3D TV and you'll be able to run the audio straight to maybe an older AV receiver that can't handle that 3D video format. So, what's nice is that you'll be able to take advantage of those high-resolution audio formats without having to buy a new 3D compatible AV receiver.
You'll also notice there's an Ethernet port on the back but the BDC-6900 does have built-in Wi-Fi which makes it a lot easier to take advantage of all those streaming media services. There's also 1GB of onboard storage so you won't need a separate USB Flash drive to access BD live features. In terms of disc loading speeds, the BDC-6900 is one of the fastest Blu-ray players that we've tested this year. There's only one faster Blu-ray player that we've tested this year and it's nice because you won't have to wait around for discs to load like you did on some of the first and second generation Blu-Ray players that came out. If you want to use the 3D capabilities of this Blue-ray player, you're going to need a new 3D compatible HDTV and you're going to need 3D glasses that you're going to have to wear every time you watch 3D content. There's also not that many free movies available right now and there's only a handful expected by the end of the year.
Now, we were only able to checkout the 3D functionality of this player using Samsung's 3D TV and their 3D starter kit and while it does create a very credible 3D effect that can be quite impressive at times, there were too many artifacts that we saw that kind of took us out of the experience. I'm Matthew Moskovciak, Senior Associate Editor at CNET.com and this is the Samsung BDC-6900.
