I have both the 931 (I'm selling the 931 if anyone is interested
[email protected]) and the new 841. If not for the superb 720p picture through the DVI, I'd throw both units through the window. I wish Samsung would charge a bit more for their players and put a little thought into the design. For instance:
The 931:
The remote is a piece of crap that you have to hit the button a few times for it to work, and you need to aim it almost straight on the unit. It was aso nearly immpossible to "learn" it to a universal.
DVD's have a major case of the stickey's in this player. I learned to wash whatever I put in there beforehand.
The one good thing about the unit, the ability to upconvert to 720p or 1080i, was mitigated by having to get up and do it manually.
Now we have the brand new 841.
The remote is better laid out and much more responsive. It has a scroll through button for 480p, 720p 760p and 1080i. But it doen't have a "last used" setting for it. So if you pop in a new disc (or go back to watching a long paused one) you then lose the setting and it reverts back to 480p. This really sucks because you don't realize it until it dawns on you that the picture ain't all that clear anymore.
What's worse is if you pause a film for a while and the machine goes into sleep mode, you lose it. This is a step backwards and quite absurd. Being busy, it sometimes takes a few days to watch one movie in chunks. I need to call Samsung, as something may be wrong with my unit.
Positives include sacd and dvda. I've only listened to a couple of discs in each format and they sound suprisingly good. Of course I wasn't expecting much, but it didn't have that shrill sound that you'd expect form a $180 player that features superb video through a DVI connection and HD upconversion as it's selling points. Adding both these multi channel high rez formats to the player and having them sound decent enough is a nice bonus. Smart too, as they are already connected to a multi channel system, so why not?
