Gadget Of The Week: Samsung HT-BD7200

With so much technology coming out of CES and Macworld, picking a Gadget of the Week at this time of year is more or less like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. But the HT-BD7200 Blu-ray home theater with 2.1 speakers from Samsung is a clear winner in terms of style, and we like to see anything that can help bring Blu-ray into the public consciousness.

Samsung's "Touch of Color" red accents are coming back for more in 2009, but in other respects the HT-BD7200 is a new creature: this wall-mountable disc player packs in BD-Live support as well as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio for lossless audio goodness. It's also working Netflix online video and the Pandora music dealie, and can be networked with ethernet or a separate USB draft-N dongle.

You'll also find an iPod dock and A2DP streaming from compatible Bluetooth audio devices.

And the subwoofer is "kelp-based." I did not (nay, could not) make that up.

In other words, Samsung's newest Blu-ray player offers just about everything but the kitchen sink, which helps us hope that the Blu-ray players of 2009 aren't as featureless and lackluster as those of 2008.

Also, for my fellow audiophiles, Samsung offers both 5.1 and speakerbar-with-wireless-subwoofer alternatives.