January 18, 2009

More on the Samsung V+

Couple of things I'd like to say on the likely new V+;
1) The August 2008 release hasn't happened, so maybe this piece of hardware just didn't make the grade or couldn't be customised with the Liberate software used by VM. Five months have passed, so things aren't following the plan detailed. (See the bottom of this post though for a more positive view from someone better informed!)
2) I can't see any Dolby logo on the box; does the Samsung support 5.1 sound? (Mind you, if the box is an engineer's test sample then it wouldn't necessarily have all the livery of a production model.) To my eyes it's a better looking box - wonder what the remote looks like?
3) The document leaked is very much for installers rather than being a full technical evaluation by the engineers at VM. No technical details of the new box to give us an idea of whether this new box would be an improvement or compromise over what we have already. The reduction in ports makes sense to me as standards such as HDMI have become the norm. I'd like to know more about the disc, RAM and processor speed compared with the older box.
4) Much as I love new toys, sometimes it's better to stick with what you have than risk an upgrade, at least until things have stabilised. Unless you need the new box to receive additional HD channels, I'll be sticking with the Scientific Atlanta box for now.
-post edited-

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I found the speculations about it being a budget box interesting. If it has such a small hard drive and some of the features have been gutted but the box performs better than that's great for the company. It perhaps allows them to lower the installation costs from £150 or £99 or £75 (whichever is true at the time) or make a bigger margin/smaller loss.