Samsung BD-J5900 Review

At first glance, the Samsung BD-J5900 Blu-ray player looks like something straight out of a Salvador Dali painting. It has an unattractive, curved design with striped sides. Beauty is only skin deep, though.

Top Ten Reviews Verdict

The Samsung BD-J5900 offers excellent video quality and boots quickly, and its downloadable apps make it versatile and convenient.

Pros

  • +

    This player supports both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD.

Cons

  • -

    It sports a gaudy curved design.

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At first glance, the Samsung BD-J5900 Blu-ray player looks like something straight out of a Salvador Dali painting. It has an unattractive, curved design with striped sides. Beauty is only skin deep, though. Internally, this 3D Blu-ray player is packed with software and features that make it an attractive choice of a Blu-ray player. It supports deep color, 24p playback, and audio standards like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. It does not offer native 4K support, but it upscales 4K content and has superior video quality.

There are just two buttons on this Blu-ray player’s front: power and eject. There's no display of any sort. Samsung definitely was going for a simple approach for the player’s design, although we would have liked at least some sort of a light to let us know if the player was on. During our hands-on testing, the BD-J5900 took just 6.8 seconds to boot, twice as fast as most other players. The 3D playback of the movie "Gravity" was smooth, and the player functioned without any issues. Its software and menus are easy to navigate, and you can add your own favorites to easily access specific apps from the main screen.

This Blu-ray and DVD player also has built-in Wi-Fi and a standard suite of streaming services and apps like Netflix. You can fire up the Opera TV Store to download other apps like YouTube, Dailymotion, AccuWeather and BBC News. The USB connectivity means you can directly access your photos and videos from an external hard drive or flash drive too. With the player's DLNA support, you can access your files over the cloud as well. Besides USB, externally, the rest of the player includes Ethernet and a single coaxial audio port.

Samsung offers a one-year warranty on the J5900. The manufacturer also provides support through several methods, including online chat, email and telephone.

Although we aren’t fans of the Samsung BD-J5900’s design, it has an impressive feature set, an app store, an intuitive menu and Dolby TrueHD support. Its video quality is strong, despite not supporting 4K content natively.

Jonathan Knoder
TTR Contributing Editor

With a Bachelors Degree in Communications and Media from Weber State University, Jonathan Knoder is all about Smart Home and AV tech. He currently works as a Content Manager for AvantGuard Monitoring Centers in Utah. Jonathan has written extensively, and at great length, about TV antennas and aerials for Top Ten Reviews, and this is his subject area.