I don't know if anyone else has had the problems I have had with my Samsung DVD-909 player, so I thought I'd post my experiences here to see. Additionally, it might be useful for any prospective buyers to listen and learn.

I purchased the DVD-909 in September of last year and found that it would not play the "The Matrix" DVD. So a call to Samsung ended with me taking the unit to my local service center and having the firmware updated.

Down time - 10 days.

When I got the unit back, it played "The Matrix" fine, although layer changes occured with a pretty significant "jump". Although irritating, it was not enough to pursue and I let it go.

Some months later, this April, my trusty DVD-909 started to reject all DVD's loaded. This would manifest itself as "failures to load" or ejecting the disk after playing for about 15 minutes. Another call to Samsung ended in taking the unit to my local service center and having the "pickup" replaced.

Down time - 14 days

Upon return of the unit, the special edition of "The Abyss" would come to a stop at chapter 47 and then jump to the end of 48, skipping everything in between. Did this real consistantly. Other DVD's experienced random pauses in the middle of the program.

Wonderful.

Another call to Samsung (actually several) resulted in the decision to replace the DVD-909 with a reconditioned unit. Seems that all I have to do is ship my player (at my expense) to some place in New Jersey and they will "send you a reconditioned DVD (determined by current inventory) to your adress". I'm not real sure what "determined by current inventory" means, but I guess I'll find out.

So as of today, I have Fed-Ex'd my DVD-909 off to New Jersey and will wait, again.

Down-time - unknown

I hope that this does not go the way of a similar deal I had with Sony over a car CD player. The reconditioned unit only worked marginally better than what it replaced. And that was after a month of working with their customer support.

The point of all this is that Samsung's customer support does not seem real responsive. I have been playing the game and just keep being inconvinenced. And it's most likely not over.

If the reconditioned unit does not work perfectly (!), I will begin a battle with Samsung for my money back.
I'll have to buy another DVD player (a Toshiba or Pioneer) in the mean time to eliminate any more down time. Besides, chances are that I'm going to eat the DVD-909 (as I did the Sony) and have to replace it anyway.

Something to think about when you are shopping for DVD players...