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• The Good: Easy to set up for initial use with HDMI cable, and it has a remote control that's easy to figure out.
• The Bad: It's hard to find out how to change the aspect ratio; few DVDs can be played on it; there are few movies made for it.
• The Verdict: Considering its limitations, the cost is prohibitive, especially since its upcoming competitors with the HD-DVD format will be half the price.
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REVIEW:

It might seem churlish to say that the most exciting thing about the first Blu-ray DVD player to hit the market in Canada is a simple cable. But there you have it.

Perhaps I was excited because the Samsung BD-P1000 is the first gadget I've played with that features an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) cable. HDMI has been around since 2002, and transfers 165 megapixels per second (nearly 5 Gbps) - the highest-definition digital TV standard - as well as eight channels of 24-bit uncompressed digital audio at 192 kHz. It can also detect a DVI device on the other end and switch to the DVI protocol automatically.

Never mind. HDMI is the only cable — aside from the power cord — that you need to install to get the BD-P1000 running (if your TV also has the HDMI interface, that is). Yes, it's no big deal to plug in the four RCI cables of a composite connection, but the HDMI certainly cleans up the snarl of wires in your home theatre, as well as the snarl of knowledge you need to have about connecting old-style audio-video components, each one of which seems to demand a different skill set to operate.

I mention the cable first because of its wow factor, by which I mean the surprise evoked by a new technology. Blu-ray, of course, is supposed to make you go wow for the detail of the picture, not the connections, but frankly, it's the HDMI cable that did it for me.

Let me explain. The wow factor represents a quantum leap in technology in which the new is so much better than the old as to make users say wow. That happened when I shifted from analogue television to HDTV. Not only did the new DTV channels look stunning, the old standard broadcast looked dramatically better too.

The difference between DTV and Blu-ray is a lot less dramatic — hence, a more muted wow factor.

I watched two different things on the $1,299 (Cdn. list) Samsung BD-P1000 — a demonstration Blu-ray DVD as well as a re-mastered Blu-ray version of The Fifth Element, which I enjoy not because of Bruce Willis or the special effects, but because I can watch Milla Jovovich prattle on in an alien language for hours.

The DVD demo disc was interesting. Although the Blu-ray movie trailers on it (quite a number of them, from Chicken Little to Hitch) were sharp and detailed, they didn't immediately make me say wow. I had to reserve my surprise for the disc's side-by-side comparisons of DVD and Blu-ray. There, the difference was dramatic.

I watched The Fifth Element from beginning to end, and I must say that whatever surprise it held for me was not in its Blu-ray detail but in my rediscovery of the movie's humour, which I seemed to have forgotten about. Moreover, the original film had been shot in Cinemascope, which is a lot wider than my HDTV wide-screen TV, resulting in black bands on the top and bottom. The resulting picture was dramatically smaller than my TV was capable of showing.

I ran into my first problems trying to make the picture fill my screen.

An hour with the manual proved fruitless, despite the presence of an aspect-ratio button on the remote. I tried to get the remote to talk directly to the TV set, but none of the codes offered by the Samsung manual seemed to work for my TV.

Then I put in a standard DVD movie into the Blu-ray player to see how it would look, and something else happened that I could not control: The image immediately filled up the entire screen, but did not adjust the aspect ratio accordingly, meaning the picture was squished vertically. Again, another hour with the manual proved frustrating, and I concluded that I might have to start meddling with the settings on my TV instead.

I also noted in the manual a long list of DVD discs that are not recommended for playing on the Samsung BDS-P1000. It was a dispiriting experience, and not what I want from a home-theatre component.

But as much as I enjoyed The Fifth Element again, I wasn't any more impressed by the Blu-ray version than I was by Milla Jovovich's unnaturally orange hair-do (with black roots showing), which was a surprising choice of colour for a supreme being.

So what good would owning a Blu-ray disc player be? Perhaps for detail freaks, those who want to examine every bolt as it flies off an exploding car in the next James Bond film, or count the drops of blood in the umpteenth remake of Scary Movie.

This is not why I watch movies. I've found after watching films over a lifetime that lasting satisfaction comes from the quality of the story and performances of the cast, not the sharpness of detail. I know there are people who go to movies just for the special effects, but those thrills are transitory, and are more easily forgotten than a good story.

That's why I still rate black-and-white movies such as The Philadelphia Story and Casablanca among my all-time top-10 favourites. And in Psycho Alfred Hitchcock proved to me that I didn't need to see deep-down-and-dirty detail to be scared silly, nor did I even need adequate film-making to be suitably mesmerized by the crude techniques of The Blair Witch Project.

You can't leave a live-theatre performance humming the scenery, and you also can't leave a movie theatre raving about the details of Bruce Willis' hair.

This is not to say that I disapprove of the detail of high-definition DVD discs, either the Blu-Ray standard (supported by Samsung, Pioneer and Sony) or the HD-DVD discs (supported by Toshiba, Intel and Microsoft). Far from it. I really do welcome them as the proper development of video and home entertainment. I expect that in the near future, many films will be shot exploiting the format, and we will all be the better for it, the way we were all the better for the advancements of talkies, colour and computer graphics.

But the question is whether the market so demands cinematic detail that it is willing to shell out $1,299 (Cdn. list) for a player, all the while understanding that very few titles have yet been released for either the Blu-ray or HD DVD formats. So far, only a fraction of the market can even watch them because it doesn't have digital TV, and it's already paying quite a lot for it — not only for components, but the monthly fees to cable providers, which are steep too.

It might well prove to be a technology that will take a long time to catch on. I'll hold off getting a Blu-ray player until I am certain the kinds of movies I like to watch (generally those without car-chase scenes or exploding airplanes) are available for it and that my viewing pleasure will be greatly enhanced by it.

Call it the wow factor.