Samsung's Lack of Support for their Blu-ray player

For those who have bought Samsung's Blu-ray players and have tried to run Pirate's of the Caribbean 3, you have probably discovered that it doesn't work. The answer Samsung gives is that the movie industry hasn't settled on a standard and won't until next year. Furthermore, any firmware fix won't happen until well into January. Read that to mean that Samsung has no desire to update the firmware until the industry decides on a standard. That means we are left holding the bag because Samsung doesn't want to spend the money to achieve customer satisfaction. When I called Disney, they told me that Samsung had provided them the beta of the new firmware update and Disney formatted the POC 3 to run on it. However, when the firmware came out, Samsung had made some changes. My recommendation is for folks NOT to buy the Samsung player. Go with the industry standard such as Sony or Panasonic. Stay away from anything produced by a company who is unwilling to back their product with the technical support necessary to keep their customers loyal to them.

Maybe better if you watch all 3 movies in sequence

I am not a big fan of having to watch multiple movies (in a series) in sequence to have to understand better what is going on with any of the individual movies in the series. I'd much prefer that each movie stands on it's own and that I not have to have had any knowledge of the previous movies to be able to enjoy and understand whatever movie in the series I happen to be watching. Unfortunately that is not the way that I think the Pirates of the Caribbean movies must be taken. Instead, it seems that you'd need to sit down and watch all 3 movies in sequence -- no small task given the length of a few of the movies in the series -- so that you'd be able to follow what is going in and why some events are happening in the later movies.

Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End looks great on Blu-ray disc and played without issue on my 60GB Playstation 3 (running latest system firmware). Sadly I can't afford a 1080p monitor so I didn't have to worry about whether it was 1080p or 1080i, but I was well aware (thanks to earlier news clips) that it was encoded for 1080p and simply mislabelled on the box.

I wish the movie lived up to the looks though. At 2 hours, 48 minutes, it was too long, and for the first hour and 20 minutes (give or take, up until approx. chapter 12 on the disc) it really felt long. The later hour to hour and 20 minutes of the movie picks up the pace somewhat, but again you may be wondering about various plot points that would seem to have been set up by the prior movies.

If you are going to buy, buy all 3 movies and block off a weekend to view them all. The picture quality, sound quality, etc., and the rest of the experience on Blu-ray disc is quite satisfying. If you have the time to watch the movies in sequence, you'd probably rate them much higher than I have here and possibly deservedly so. In my case, I've subtracted at least 1 star for the idea that I must watch the prior movies fairly closely to the third so that I could keep up with the longer term storylines.

great entertaining movie...tech issues a non-issue

I didn't think this was the best of the 3 but it was still great. Video quality was superb; encoded in MPEG4-AVC at like 30Mb/s average. Audio was 5.1 PCM, 24bit/48Khz. Many Disney Blu-Rays are labeled at 24bit but are really 16bit...this is not one of them.

As to the whole 1080i thing...why does it matter? Since the movie is 24 frames/second and a 1080i signal would be 60 frames, all the detail would be there as the even and odd frame of the interlaced signal are in the same time domain as frame of the movie, so there would be NO MOTION ARTIFACTS. The full 1920*1080 would be seen on a 1080p display. This isn't true of things recorded in native 1080i (like sports), but for sources that are natively recorded as progressive at 24 or 30 frames/second, 1080i = 1080p.

BTW, the movie is 1080p so it's no biggie. It was a typo. Even if it were 1080i it wouldn't matter anyway.