Black Boxes: Samsung DVD-N501 NUON-enhanced DVD player and Bedazzled
COMPANY: Samsung
CONTACT: (201) 229-4000
WEB SITE: www.samsungusa.com
PRICE: $280
As a medium for delivering video content, the un-enhanced DVD format offers viewers greater selectivity than VHS tape. It is a random access medium: it allows viewers to skip from one segment to another depending on the moment's interest. It allows DVD authors to thread the various segments in different orders depending on preferences indicated by viewers up front, or by the choices they make as a program unfolds. The format itself supports search functions, slideshows, quizzes and limited game play. DVD is smart TV.
NUON technology super-charges the format's native capabilities with features such as customizable user interfaces, smooth zooming and panning of scenes, and graphics processing quick enough to generate visual patterns from music and to support high-speed games.
At the time when it was still in development and Smart TV and Sound first began to track it, NUON seemed a promising technology. To date, however, only two manufacturers have released NUON DVD players in the U.S. and few software developers have written programs that make use of it. Those programs that have been written, regrettably, have been lackluster. This is through no fault of Samsung, the company which took the lead in bringing NUON DVD players to the U.S. market.
Samsung's DVD-N501 is one of its series of NUON-enhanced players. For an example of another, see our review of the Extiva DVD-N2000 in the Winter 2000 issue. The N504 and N505 have apparently succeeded the 501 in the Samsung line.
What's It Do?
Some of the buttons on the DVD-N501's remote launch its more interesting features. The NUON Web site (www.nuon-tech.com) lists the first four of these as NUON-specific.
The DVD-N501 can also scan DVDs up to 256 times their normal playing speed and can play back MP3, DVD-R and VideoCD discs.
In our tests, all of these functions worked as advertised. We then focused on the player's ability to support the features of a NUON-enhanced DVD program.
A Test Drive
To try the player's support of these, we played Bedazzled from Fox DVD Video. This is one of the very few movie DVDs to come to market with NUON-enhanced features. "Loading NUON features" appeared on the screen as the disc began to spin. Interestingly, when we pushed the "NUON" button on the remote, it stated the number of NUON features on the disc to be "none."
Bedazzled gives the viewer a choice between four menus from which to enter the movie: Rich, Famous, Intelligent or Sensitive. The only difference between these, however, is the background used for each menu. They all launch the same movie, scenes and special features. This choice of menus serves only to create an expectation it doesn't satisfy. In any case, it didn't require NUON technology. The special features menu itself, though, held a link to another menu of NUON-enhanced features. "Aha!" we thought. "This is where we'll see NUON's real benefits for movie enhancement."
The disc's listed NUON features included "Viddies," "Gamma Zooms" and "Hyper Slides," all trademarks of VM Labs, the owner of NUON technology before it was sold to Genesis Microchip, Inc.
The DVD-N501 had no trouble supporting any of these features, delivering them all without loss of quality or sound sync.
Having experienced all the Bedazzled applications had to offer, we were left humming, "Is that all there is?" Let's commend Fox DVD Video for giving NUON a try, but even if they were placed on every movie DVD in existence, Viddies, Gamma Zooms and Hyper Slides would hardly drive mass acceptance of NUON technology.
A Samsung representative recently told us that the company will put development of further NUON products "on hold" until software providers offer more new titles that make use of NUON functions. That doesn't seem likely when so few NUON players are available in the market and when their capabilities are little understood and less advertised. Chicken or egg?
Performance
Lacking a proliferation of NUON-enhanced titles, the owner of a DVD-N501 would have to judge the machine on its day-to-day performance playing ordinary titles. In this regard, our unit had its share of problems. It froze during a zoom at least once during our test. More seriously, it had a tendency to lose lip-sync after playing a movie for more than half-an-hour. Samsung fixed this problem by providing a firmware upgrade through its Web site. This, however, seemed to fix the sound sync problem by freezing a frame occasionally until sound and picture got back into sync. This would happen several times in the course of a movie: an unsatisfactory solution. When playing one movie, The Lord of the Rings, the player crashed. After numerous attempts, we discovered it entirely incapable of playing one of the chapters. We were able to play the same disc, including the chapter in question, in other players without a hitch.
On the other hand, we found the N501 to be a versatile machine as it did support the various non-DVD-video formats (DVD-R, videoCD, MP3, audio CD) as advertised.
SMART SPECS
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