CES 2009: Samsung get wall mount fever with the first attachable Blu-ray player

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Daniel Sung writes…

Alongside the glut of screens and assorted boxed up circuitry, Samsung announced the slightly bizarre but rather attractive wall mountable BD-P4600 Blu-ray player. Funnily enough, it’s the first wall mountable Blu-ray player largely because most normal people aren’t interested in stapling all appliance to their masonry. What’s next? The kettle? The 1″ microwave?

The first rule of wall mounting in the ancient rule book that I’ve just invented is that you’d better make the object worth looking at. Well, yes, it is pretty but I’m not sure it’s pretty enough. Surely we only wall mount TVs because putting them inside a cupboard rather defeats the object of the exercise? I wonder if anyone pointed that one out in the meeting?

The 1.5″ thick BD-P4600 supports wireless and Ethernet connectivity, like everything else so far today, and features two USB ports as well. The same goes for the fatter BD-P3600 announced at the same time and pictured below.

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The internet way of life and 1GB of internal storage gives these machines access to the Samsung BD-Live service with music from Pandora and all the films and TV you can stream from Netflix – well, 12,000 of them at any rate.

Both players can, of course, provide 1080p video, will play DivX and upscale DVDs as well. Soundwise, they can handle all the latest high-def audio formats including Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, dts-HD HR / MA and they’ll work with 7.1 surround set ups which is useful because Samsung released one of those too.

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Lucy Hedges