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There's one small grievance to report. With the player set to output 1080/24p (displayed on a 24fps-capable Toshiba 52Z3030 with 5:5 pulldown), the picture suffers from an occasional stutter but it's not a major problem.

The deck's DVD upscaling is solid, with Superman Returns looking suitably detailed and artefact-free. The spectacular scene in which Superman brings a plane down to land in a baseball stadium is vibrant and contains a decent amount of detail.

Not only are we impressed by the deck's ability to decode three of the four HD formats, but also by its general sound quality. We hooked up the BD-P1400 to the 5.1-channel inputs of our receiver and let it rip with Déjà Vu's 5.1-channel PCM soundtrack, and the results were spectacular. The constant barrage of explosions, car crashes and gun shots are delivered with real kick, while bread-and-butter audio elements like dialogue and music are also delivered with pleasing clarity. CD playback is also warm and inviting, though in operational terms it's very slow to select a track due to the long pause after pressing the button.

Verdict

The BD-P1400 is a marked improvement on the BD-P1000 in terms of design, performance and features and is superior to the feature-light Sony BDP-S300. But the Samsung's Profile 1.0 specification will make it outdated very quickly, and for this reason we reckon it might be a better idea to hold out for a Profile 1.1 deck, the first of which are being launched later this year. But if you absolutely have to buy a Blu-ray deck now, and you're not bothered about BonusView, then you could do a lot worse than the BD-P1400, particularly when you consider its very reasonable price tag.

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