Aside from price, the biggest criticism of Blu-ray so far has been picture quality. Those that picked up the Samsung BD-P1000 quickly found out that the video did not look as good as those in the HD DVD format. AVGuide.com has reported that this is due to the noise-reduction circuit being enabled, causing the picture to soften significantly.
Don Eklund, executive vice president of advanced technologies at Sony Pictures, noticed that the player's image did not match the quality of the master tapes from which the Blu-ray titles were encoded. He contacted Samsung, whose engineers determined that the noise-reduction circuit in the player's Genesis scaler chip was enabled, causing the picture to soften significantly.
According to Jim Sanduski, senior vice president of marketing for Samsung's Audio and Video Products Group, "Samsung is currently working to revise the default settings on the noise-reduction circuit in the Genesis scaler chip to sharpen the picture. All future Samsung BD-P1000 production will have this revision and we are working to develop a firmware update for existing product."
It's good to see that Sony and Samsung are responding to the problem. If you'd like to read more, the entire article can be found here.