Power on, wait, wait, wait. Open disc tray, wait, wait, wait. Load movie, wait, wait, wait. This is my experience with the first blu-ray player on the market, made by Samsung, not Sony. Sony may have invented blu-ray, but due to technical difficulties their own player has been delayed, first from their initial launch date of March, to July, then to August, and now October. “Software-related issues” is the only reason they offer and these may be the same issues that also forced a delayed launch for their blu-ray enabled PlayStation 3, once expected to hit stores in the spring, now delayed until November. It’s odd that Samsung hasn’t suffered from the same issues.

The Samsung BD-P1000 is a large machine, bigger than most laptops, satellite boxes, and game consoles. It’s very expensive too, $1300 which is almost twice the cost of the first HD-DVD player ($650) and little can be said as to why that is other than Sony’s admittance that blu-ray is more ambitious and simply an expensive technology to make.

Both HD-DVD and blu-ray machines take a long time to do anything, Samsung has even added an animated hourglass symbol, the kind you see on a computer when it’s working away. When it does finish loading, little blue accents lights on the front face light up, including a backlit blu-ray logo right on the disc tray itself. Nice touches that heighten the player’s sleek look.

The front is split horizontally by a lower, silver accent strip that helps disguise a double memory card slot built to accept digital pictures from memory sticks, SD cards, and MMC cards. The minimal controls include a playback dial and an odd button for switching the output signal from HDMI, Component, to Video. Since the player will automatically detect and adjust the resolution of its output signal to match the type of television its connected to, I have no idea what this button is for, except to connect the player up to multiple high-definition televisions, each using a different cable connection, allowing you to switch from one set to another? Who would want to do this? The manual offers no explanation.

Both the player and all the movies currently available support full, 1080p playback. That’s the highest number of resolution lines possible for high definition and in progressive scan, considered to be the better format over interlaced.

In my test I used Sharp’s new 57” Aquos LCD which also supports 1080p. Not many televisions do, just a handful and most suffer the same twist as the Aquos. While the television can support 1080p, it can only do so for over-the-air broadcasts and not from cable connected components like a blu-ray player. All three items – tv, player, and movie, may support 1080p, but because of poor planning by television manufacturers, the movie can only be played in 1080i.

I knew this before I chose the Aquos as my test display, but chose it anyway partly because it helps prove this point, but also because I valued having a larger, error-revealing screen with a picture quality I was familiar with over experiencing a resolution that offers up a mere hair-splitting difference over the already-immaculate 1080i resolution. My recommendation is that you should too.

“Underworld: Evolution”, “Hitch”, and “Basic Instinct 2” are the three movies Sony provided me for my test which leads to a rather interesting issue, one that is not Samsung’s fault. The first wave of blu-ray movies inexplicably consist of awful titles. For your $1300 investment you can be rewarded with finally seeing such classics as “XXX”, “50 First Dates”, “Stealth”, and “Resident Evil” in high definition. The release schedule will no doubt get better, but the HD-DVD camp definitely has the monopoly on Ebert & Roeper Thumbs Up picks and Oscar winners.

I can’t believe I waited all these years just to end up watching a 48 year-old Sharon Stone cross and uncross her legs again in High Definition on a 57” screen, but there’s the rub as of the three titles I was forced to watch for this task, “Basic Instinct 2” had the best picture quality. Cinematographer Gyula Pados’ immaculate use of stark locations, city nights, apartments, offices, and his lighting of exotic cars and clothing in the movie are richly rewarded by a crisp digital mastering. It’s not his fault the movie is as bad as it is, he didn’t write the script and perhaps he should have. The difference between that and “Hitch”, which had some film grain or image noise proves that simply transferring a movie onto a disc format with the best supported resolution, for a player with the best resolution, doesn’t matter if the source movie and DVD authoring company can’t meet the grade.

Between my sessions in watching blu-ray movies and hd-dvd movies, it’s obvious that both formats have their share of average-looking and great-looking titles and neither pulls out ahead of the other.

Thankfully, Samsung has designed the BD-P1000 to also play regular DVDs, CDs, and the recordable –R versions of each. In the case of DVDs the player will actually “upconvert” the movie to a high definition resolution. This gives the movie that extra “pop”. Although they don’t have the same level of crispness and clarity as blu-ray movies, your DVD movie will look fantastic.

This brings me to an interesting conclusion. I can’t recommend the BD-P1000, partly because it’s an over-priced, sluggish first-of-its-kind that will no doubt become cheaper, sleeker, and better over time, but also because blu-ray technology itself is currently in a befuddled state with a murky future.

You might look past all of this, should there be a very foolish home theatre freak in you, one that wants something better than regular DVDs. I can understand, I don’t agree, but I understand and so in that thought I suggest you instead look at another Samsung DVD player. Although it can’t play the new blu-ray discs, the Samsung HD-860 can do everything else. It uses “upconverts” standard DVDs for Hi-Def, for both 720p and 1080i, uses an HDMI connection, plays recordable CDs and DVDs, is small and sleek, works properly, and get this….comes with a price of just $150 and you watch any movie you want.