I have to admit, I had some trepidation going into this review. The track record for Samsung's flat panels has not been that great. Like all Samsung products, nevertheless, they have come a long way in a very short time. So when Samsung's TV test manager and HT alum Mike Wood recommend I check out the company's new LN-T5265F LCD flat panel ($3,999 Minimum Advertised Price), I begrudgingly agreed. If you'll remember, Samsung's HL-S6188W won our last RPTV Face Off, its predecessor finishing mid-pack the year before. Perhaps this LCD would make a similar jump. We shall see.

While the in the end, Samsung's first foray into the Blu-ray world wasn't the major culprit in said format's poor picture quality (turns out most of the early discs just didn't look very good), it was still rather lackluster. It didn't upconvert DVDs very well, it didn't offer a 1080p/24 output, and it didn't decode any of the new audio formats. With its second-generation offering, Samsung has fixed most of these shortcomings. Most.

LG shocked the consumer electronics world at CES when they announced that, not only were they coming out with a player that would play Blu-ray and HD DVD, but it would be shipping in less than a month. True to their word, it did, and I got one in to try out. Around the same time, Toshiba released a pair of second-generation HD DVD players. The model I look at here, the HD-XA2, is notable as it is the first HD DVD player to output 1080p. The Blu-ray camp (seeing as they had just released most of their players) had no such exciting newness beyond what you read about in our April issue. So, we got in the Panasonic DMP-BD10 Blu-ray player, which is unique in that it doesn't seem to be a clone of any other players (which you can't say for many of the BD players out there). Where should your money go (if at all)? Just keep reading.