Sammy BD-P1200 Firmware Upgrade

[krisjan]

Originally Posted by KenB

Mark,

You shouldn't be mad! That's how it is in this early adopter phase of the technology. New products every few months with (generally) better features at (generally) better prices. The alternative is to wait a couple of years until the whole thing matures, but then you'd miss out on all that gorgeous hi-def video.

The only two significant things I can think are likely to appear in the 1400 are BD-J 1.1 and DTS HD MA and we all knew those weren't baked into the 1200 when we made our purchase.

Relax and enjoy the great performance from your 1200!

I get the whole early-adopter thing. I was an early adopter of SACD when it came out and that was a very positive experience for me. In this case, the 1200 is a 2nd gen. player and I would have expected it to be in the market for much longer than 9 months before being superceded. That's the main point I am making. It just seems that Samsung was too hasty in getting the 1200 to market and should have kept with the 1000 for a bit longer and avoided the 1200 in favor of the 1400 later this year.

As to whether the 1200 will do BD spec 1.1, I sent an email to Samsung tech support asking if the 1200 will support 1.1 and their reply was simply "yes". They did not say if a firmware upgrade would be needed to enable this (but I assume that to be the case). Over on AVS, there is a discussion about the 1200 and the specific Broadcom chip that is used in it. When Samsung announced the 1200 at CES in January, they said it would use the latest Broadcom chip (7440) that enables BD spec 1.1. However, an owner of the player opened his up and verified that it uses the earlier Broadcom 7411 chip which is not BD spec 1.1 compliant. So it looks like the 7440 chip was not available to meet Samsung's release plans and they opted for the 7411. This likely menas that their tech support answer to my question was incorrect - i.e. the player will not be able to support BD spec 1.1. Another thing that makes me angry.
Mark