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Review : Samsung DVD-P241 Slim DVD player
Last Saturday on my birthday my girlfriend Kymberly gave me the best damn DVD player that a guy could ever want. I read some reviews of the stock at the local stores and the one that really caught my eye was the Samsung DVD-P241 Slim DVD player.
This is a freaking cool super slim flat DVD player that can deliver crystal clear progressive-scan DVD playback. It delivers 480p progressive-scan video output for seamless, flicker-free images on high-definition and HD-ready TVs. I do not have a HD-ready TV but the S-video output looks freaking brilliant on my LCD TV. It has this cool 3:2 pulldown technology for smoother video rendering of 24 FPS movies at 30 FPS NTSC TVs. You see there is a slight frame offset from playing back a film shot at 24 frames per second and playing it back at 30 frames per second on a TV. What this does is it plays some frames longer so the image syncs up at the next second. What that really means is hat DVDs movies look freaking fluid and nice.
Samsung has this image scaling system called EZ-View. You can scale the image of a wide screen DVD movie and have it played centered and cropped to make a wide screen DVD movie play backed as cropped full frame version. Or you can vertically stretch the image to get rid of those black bars by making every thing stretched. Personally I don't know why the hell someone would ever want to do this. It is like taking a finely tenderized top sirloin steak and boiling it before microwaving it and covering it with non-Heinz catchup.
It has a s-video and composite output jacks but it did not come with an S-video cable in the box. The unit is about a foot and a half long but it is not that deep and it is only an inch and a half tall. It is almost totally silent. I have my Gamecube resting on top of it.
There is play, stop, skip, rewind and eject button on the front of the unit so you can play a DVD without having to use the remote. The remote is nice and ergonomic and you can turn the unit off and on with it. There is no way to skip past DVDs that have the force commercials but the fast forward and rewind playback comes in 2X, 8X, 32X and super freaking fast 128X speed. So I can play the Lost in Translation DVD and skip past the forced commercial trailers in about three seconds. This unit will only play Region 1 US DVDs but my PS2 can play international DVDs via the Gameshark.
There is a pretty slick JPEG viewer and a MP3 viewer with a very nice interface. So you can burn a CD full of pictures and tunes and play it back without having to use a PC. It would have been cool to have a wide selection of PC video and music files but such is life. The bootleg import Godzilla movies on DVD-Rs that BBQ gave me worked perfectly.
One little thing that I like about it is that it will remember where you stopped playing a DVD when you turned it off and it will jump to that place when you turn it on again. It is very nice when playing super long movies such as The Lord of the Ring Extended Edition.
The impressive thing is that the player is only $55 bucks. It is bit weird that a South Korean company like Samsung would have their DVD players made in China. I would have looked into a US made DVD player but I don't think there is one single company that actually makes a DVD player in the US of A.
There is no disgrace is popping some microwave popcorn and waiting to catch a movie on DVD when there are damn fine affordable players like this. I freaking love this DVD player and the fact that it has 98% of all the features that I would want in one at 55 bucks is killer wicked.
Jake at October 22, 2004 
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Comments
isn't it missing a digital display?
Posted by: ray at October 22, 2004 6:29 PM
It has an on screen menu. So you can view JPEGs that have been burned to a CD on your TV.
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at October 22, 2004 6:55 PM
Does it play VCD's also?
I have a bunch of bootleg VCD's but one of my DVD players only plays official vcd's...and how common are those eh?
Posted by: Henry at October 23, 2004 10:11 AM
You have a very cool girlfriend Jake.
Posted by: Mike of Press Start Now at October 23, 2004 3:29 PM
I am not sure. I don't have any VCDs and I don't see them mentoned.
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at October 23, 2004 7:02 PM
What I search for is a DVD player that ignores User Prohibitions.
You know there are some DVDs where you can't skip the copyright notice or the previews or stuff.
And I want a player that ignores all this stuff and does WHAT I WANT!
Does this player do this?
Posted by: Jim at October 24, 2004 5:21 AM
No it does not but the super fast forward is almost like that. My friend BBQ has a modded Sony DVD player that will ignore all user restrictions.
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at October 24, 2004 9:11 AM
i am having a problem with subtitles on this dvd player. when i first turn on the dvd player there are no subtitles, but if i turn the power off and then turn it on later to finish a movie they automatically come on even though i do not want them to. does your dvd player do this and is there an adjustment to turn this feature off with out having to hit the subtitle button every time.
Posted by: Les at January 7, 2005 3:46 AM
Sorry I have not really had that problem. Try the Setup menu when you are not playing a movie and set everything in the Language tab to English instead of Auto.
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at January 7, 2005 8:09 PM
