Samsung BD-P2550 Playback Problems

[mrbill92886]

Hello Everyone,

Santa was very generous this past Christmas and provided me with a shiny new BD-P2550. Standard DVDs play just fine and the Netflix/Pandora streaming works great. The problem I'm having is with the playback of blu-ray DVDs. I currently don't own any blu-ray discs so my experience has been confined to Netflix rentals. I'm 0 for 4 on making it through a movie without 1 to many playback hiccups. At random times during the playback, the picture and sound will begin to stutter. The picture and sound will freeze momentarily, then resume at a point several seconds later in the movie. It gradually gets worse until the picture freezes up totally with no further recovery. If I eject the disk and restart, then skip to the place where the stutter occurred, it plays back just fine (until the next random time that the stuttering begins anew). Three of the four titles are recent releases and I was probably the first person to play the DVD so I don't think the discs are at fault. I've contacted Samsung both by chat and phone and their standard reply is to wait for the next firmware update (I currently have the 2.4 release from a few days ago). The 4 movies I've tried to watch are:
1) Eagle Eye
2) Ghost Town
3) Righteous Kill
4) The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emporer
Samsung told me that Eagle Eye has playback problems (not very comforting). It stuttered/hung up on me 3 times. Ghost Town was the best of the lot. It only stuttered once, then recovered. Righteous Kill 3 times. The Mummy was unwatchable stuttering every 2-3 minutes. I returned it to Netflix for a replacement to see if there is any difference the 2nd time around.

Has anyone else had this number of problems with the 2500 or 2550? I don't' know whether I have a defective unit or Samsung hasn't got its act together with the firmware for their 5th generation player. No other player has this set of features so I hate to give it up for a different brand, but if it can't reliably play any blu-ray disc, it's not worth keeping.

Thanks for any advice that you can provide.