Only very few companies talked about Blu-ray at this year’s CES show and Samsung only had one new player to announce. The BD-F7500 is a new flagship player with Smart TV features, 4K upscaling and built-in WiFi. New HDD recorders are also coming to Europe.

Samsung BD-F7500 Blu-ray player
Blu-ray is still alive but TV manufacturers seem to have acknowledged the fact that it is a bottleneck when moving to Ultra HD and higher frame rates. Maybe that is why Samsung only had one new Blu-ray player to announce.


Samsung’s new BD-F7500 Blu-ray player takes discs but also supports streaming

Samsung BD-F7500 has a new design with a combination of a metallic silver look and glossy black. The player eats 2D & 3D Blu-ray discs, DVDs and CDs. In addition, it supports streaming from for example Netflix and has Samsung’s new Smart TV platform, including “SmartView” that streams video from the Blu-ray player to a smartphone or tablet screen.

The player has analog 7.1 outputs and can upscale Blu-ray movies to 4K resolution if you are the lucky owner of an Ultra HD TV. However, the upscaling is totally unnecessary since all Ultra HD TVs have built-in upscalers – if they did not they would not be able to reproduce full-screen images.

Samsung BD-F7500 will be available in the first half of 2013. The price has not been announced.

Two new HHD recorders
FlatpanelsHD was also able to confirm that Samsung has two new HDD recorders coming out in Europe that will replace the current three models. The new HHD recorders will have built-in hard drives and the Smart TV features.

Full specifications will be announced later, Samsung says.