Samsung BD-J5500

Disappointed with lack of apps – Having identified a program on SBS On Demand I wanted to watch, I went looking for a new Blu-ray player that could do the job. The SBS website identifies Samsung and Sony Blu-ray and smart TVs as being compatible. Samsung's Internet pages are vague as to what each product does; a Google search brings up a comparison page that seems to give useful information about the differences between different models, but this page has been removed. The product boxes give little information as well. Given a choice of a BD-H6500 and the BD-J5500 in the store I chose the latter as it was a newer (2015) release. Big mistake.

I spent several hours going through all the app options without success (after ensuring the firmware was the latest version). The manual provided with the unit is very brief and quite useless for my purposes. The full manual is not easy to find on the Samsung website and also of no utility to the question at hand. I eventually resigned myself to the realisation I had bought the wrong unit for my purposes. I bought a Sony and was viewing my SBS program within minutes.

It may be a coincidence but my Samsung TV reset itself to the utterly horrible factory picture settings as soon as I turned on the Samsung Blu-ray. I am still nudging the settings to get back to my preferred settings. Annoying in the extreme.

Finally, I had to change to default audio output to get surround even though it is connected to a moderately good receiver- it came defaulted to stereo.

Positives, it was straightforward to install and is quick to load. The quirky curved case might be to your liking but it's not to mine. By the way, I'm entirely happy with Sony so far.