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Samsung’s minimalist HT-BD1252 player has subtle touch controls along the top and a small flap on the front panel that hides a USB port. The volume control on the top of the case may be awkward if you need to stack another unit on top or place it under a shelf. Speaker setup was a breeze, thanks to the colour-coded and shaped terminals. There’s no microphone for automatic setup, but you can adjust the distance and levels of satellites manually with a test tone. Apart from the large subwoofer, the speakers felt lightweight. Surround effects were crisp and produced an impression of space, but there wasn’t enough mid-range and the bass felt isolated. The centre speaker was particularly weedy. There are no video inputs but an external iPod dock lets you watch video from your player, albeit via a composite video output. There’s a USB port for the optional WiFi dongle (around £60) and a card slot for an optional wireless rear speaker kit (around £70). The HT-BD1252 took only 37 seconds to reach the main menu of a Blu-ray film from Off, and skipped through chapters in no time. In our DVD tests we found the picture smooth but saw a bit of ghosting. You can’t play Blu-ray content recorded to DVD, but AVCHD files recorded to DVD are supported. You can access files on data discs and USB flash drives or over the network, if you’ve set up your PC for media streaming. Entering your username and password is awkward on the onscreen keyboard, but once it’s set up you have a basic media streamer, although only a bare minimum of media files are supported: JPEG photos, MP3 music and DivX videos. There’s no YouTube streaming, either.
Samsung’s HT-BD1252 is let down by poor format support (it also lacks DTS-HD MA) and no access to YouTube, while the speakers just aren’t beefy enough to warrant the ‘home cinema’ moniker. There are better kits at this price.
