Samsung BD-F8500M
Blu-ray, TV recording and video-streaming
services, all in a single box
We're baffled that it's taken so long for
someone to build a single box that does everything a modern telly-addict wants,
but it's here now and it's called the Samsung BD-F8500M. It's an unsurprisingly
large box given it contains a Blu-ray player, 500GB hard drive, twin HD TV
tuners and both Ethernet and Wi-Fi to access every streaming video service
except Sky's Now TV.
BD-F8500M
Smart 3D Blu-ray Player with 500Gb Freeview HD Recorder
This abundance of streaming services
shouldn't be underestimated - Samsung's smart Blu-ray players, including the
BD-F8500M, are currently the only ones with all the terrestrial TV catch-up
services as well as Lovefilm, Netflix and Blinkbox. However, the Smart Hub
interface - where you access these apps - and the apps themselves can be
irritatingly slow. It often appears as if nothing is happening, when in fact
it's loading or waiting for data.
The large remote control isn't easy to use.
For example, accessing the Smart Hub interface is awkward as the relevant
button is tiny and placed at the bottom of the long remote. It's especially
inconvenient that there's no dedicated button to directly access programme
recordings. Instead, it takes a lengthy nine button presses to see your
recorded shows.
Samsung's
latest all-in-one could simplify your home cinema setup
The TV Recording interface is clunky and
feels half-finished. Recordings are presented in a two-row grid, but episodes
of the same show aren't grouped together so the grid quickly becomes cluttered.
You can rename recordings and remove ads using tools in the Options menu. We
found operating the editing functions with the arrow and enter buttons of the
remote to be slow and tedious work, but patient ad-haters will nonetheless find
these tools useful.
Recordings can be scheduled from the EPG,
but the option to record all the episodes in a series is difficult to find. If
you're watching another channel when a recording finishes, then you're informed
via unnecessary and jarringly large pop-ups. When a scheduled recording is
about to start, an even larger pop-up appears asking whether you want change to
the recording channel 'to check if scheduled time has updated'. This is not
only intrusive, it's also a task the BD-F8500M should be doing itself
automatically.
At least the BD-F8500M coped well with
heavy use: we could record two HD channels while watching a Blu-ray disc or
streaming a HD video through the Lovefilm app, for example. Only when we asked
the BD-F8500M to also stream video to our PC did we encounter problems, such as
the recordings becoming corrupted so they weren't watchable. However, as the
streaming- to-PC feature only works with videos that have been copied to the
box from a USB stick, we doubt many people will encounter this problem. We had
no problems streaming music from the BD-F8500M to a PC, while recording two HD
shows and watching a Blu-ray disc.
The EPG itself is well organised, with
clearly legible programme information and a live preview of the current
channel. Pressing the Info button on the remote brings up the full program
description in a reasonably large font. You can renumber channels as well as
re-order them in the EPG, so we could change to Channel 4 HD by pressing '4'
rather than '104'. The EPG, like the rest of the interface, is a little slow
with a delay of a few seconds between pressing a button and the menus loading.
As a Blu-ray and streaming video player,
the Samsung BD-F8500M works well, but as a TV recorder it's merely adequate due
to its slow, fiddly interface. There's no cheaper way of getting all three
capabilities, though - pairing a Humax YouView DTR-T1010 recorder with the
cheaper Samsung BD-F6500 smart Blu-ray player would cost $675.06 in total which
is a lot more than the $407.67 for the BD-F8500M. If you can put up with its
flawed interface, than the BD-F8500M is a good buy.
Here's
a 1:1 crop of Blu-ray playback on the BD-F8500M
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Specifications:
·
1xHDMI«2x USB2 ·
1x Ethernet ·
Wi-Fi ·
500GB hard drive »2x Freeview HD tuners ·
55x430x282mm (HxWxD) ·
2.6kg ·
One-year warranty ·
Verdict: Niggly, awkward TV-recording features
blemish an otherwise good value set-top box that does everything ·
Alternative: Humax DTR-T1010 $346.61 A much
easier to use, if also very sluggish TV recorder
which also has all the terrestrial TV catch-up services
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