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(More customer reviews)When my 10 year old projection TV finally died recently, it was finally a good enough reason to buy a flat panel TV. I ended up buying the Samsung UN55B6000 55" LED. Of course once I got it home it confirmed to me what I knew would be the case, the sound on flat panels isn't great. It's just hard to make speakers small enough for a flat panel that are big enough to be good.
So after all of my hunting, I found the HT-BD8200. I thought it would be perfect. I could get rid of the stack of stereo and AV components and replace them with this. In theory it can replace the Radio tuner, CD player, DVD player, Blu Ray player and receiver.
I received it, hooked it up and started admiring it (I discovered rather rudely that Samsung does not put an HDMI cable in the $800 box so had to go buy one). The wireless subwoofer is awesome and I was able to hide it out of view behind the couch. The unit itself looks like it was made for my TV. It's the same glossy black glass look with the red touch of color.
I had visions of wall mounting my TV with the HT-BD8200 wall mounted right under it (it comes with a wall mount kit).
The controls on the unit are super cool touch controls. No buttons, just symbols on the top of the disc drive area that light up. Just touch the glass over the control and a small beep lets you know it's activated.
It comes with a wifi adapter so that you can stream netflix, pandora, blockbuster etc. to it over your wifi network at home.
I could babble on forever about the cool things it does which is why it breaks my heart to have to list the bad things and ultimately why I had to return it.
Once I got over the thrill of having a new toy, I started to notice buggy behavior that makes me think Samsung rushed this out or cobbled it together without enough QA testing.
- "MODE NOT SUPPORTED"
Since I connected the unit to my TV with HDMI, it activated the Samsung "Anynet" feature which basically let's the TV and soundbar talk to each other and activate Samsung specific features. For example, when you put a disc in the soundbar, it'll automatically change the TV to the correct input and start playing the disc so that you don't have to go through the "source" menu on the TV. What I found was that from time to time I'd put a disc in the soundbar, it'd change the source on the TV but then the TV would just display "Mode Not Supported".
Nothing in the manual said anything about this error and a google search came up with a million unrelated postings about the error on various Samsung products. I was able to get around it by switching the HDMI cable to another port on the TV. When the error would come up again, I'd switch it back to the original port and it would work again. Pretty crappy for an $800 product.
- "Misbehaving Night Light"
Like my TV, the soundbar has a small accent light at the bottom of the center of the unit. You can set it to be on while the unit is on, off, or all the time. I set to to be on when the unit is on. When I went to bed I turned the unit off and the light went off. The next day when I came home from work the light was on and the unit was off. I checked the setting in the menus and it was still set to be off when the unit was off... but it was on. Annoying
- "Ghost in the machine"
The soundbar started to turn itself on by itself. The first time it happened I thought maybe I had left it on without realizing it. So I made it a point to verify it was off when I went out the next day and sure enough it was back on when I came back that night. I had to start leaving it set to an unused input before turning it off to make sure it wouldn't come on blasting the radio mid day or mid night.
- "Low Volume on TV"
The volume when watching movies or listening to CD's can reasonably loud. Don't get me wrong, you cannot ever go deaf listening to this unit on max volume because it just doensn't go that loud but watching TV, the max volume seems to be roughly one third lower than on movies. I found myself watching tv on maximum volume all the time. If it was loud outside or someone was making noise in another room, max wasn't loud enough.
I thought maybe the HDMI audio was the issue so I went and bought an Optical Cable (buy the AmazonBasics one, good price and decent quality). I hooked up the Optical cable to my TV and the result was exactly the same. I then hooked the optical cable directly to my cable box. Exactly the same. Nothing could make the soundbar louder while watching TV. The TV speakers themselves were often similar in volume or louder than the soundbar. The difference was that the soundbar had richer sound. Still not acceptable when the main reason I'm buying it is because I need more volume.
- "Anynet" annoyance
As this list grew and my patience thinned, I finally hit the last straw. I wanted to play a music CD while putting around the house. The TV and soundbar were off. I turned the soundbar on and dropped in a CD. The soundbar automatically activated the anynet feature, turned on the TV and switched to the HDMI input for the soundbar as if I was going to watch a movie. Apparently Samsung didn't bother programming the soundbar not to switch if it's an audio CD. "no big deal, turn off the TV" you say? I did... and Anynet promptly shut the soundbar off with the TV. ARRRRGH!
Could I just disable anynet? Sure! But losing a big chunk of functionality when I bought two Samsung products that are supposed to work together is unreasonable to me, especially when they are as expensive as these are.
So I resigned myself to thinking this was a defective unit and I'd give it another try. I boxed it up and sent it back to Amazon. I was ready to reorder a new one, but they weren't in stock. I decided this was a good thing as if mine was defective, hopefully I'd get a newer one from a newer batch.
I waited a couple of weeks and Amazon finally got them back in stock. I ordered another and it arrived. I connected it and found that only ONE of the issues above had gone away. The new unit didn't turn itself on by itself. All of the other issues were still there.
I finally had to give up and admit that this product is just not what I hoped for and the quality was not worth $800. I sent it back and am now looking for an alternative.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Samsung HT-BD8200 Blu-Ray Sound Bar Home Theater System (Black)
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