Samsung’s BD-P3600 is apparently a nice enough gadget, which plays Blu-Ray discs and DVDs and streams online content from Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services. Well, in theory. It seems to be an okay device as long as you don’t like to watch anything released in the last six months or so. Thanks to a firmware problem, it can’t deal with new discs.

Reader Shawn wrote to us about his player, which doesn’t perform the simple function of letting him watch new movies that he gets from Netflix. Yes, the company eventually updates the firmware, but it takes a while. “There is no update available to get the product to work currently,” he writes. “I spoke with them once and was told there would be a software fix available in 5 days.” Five days later? No fix. Ten days later? No fix. Months later? No fix. Updates come, but entertainment companies just keep releasing new films afterward, darn it.

Consumer Reports readers agree that the inability to play new films is just one of the disappointing things about this model. For Shawn’s part, he wants to use a player that’s still on the market to play discs that were released a few months ago. This is apparently unreasonable. He writes:

If a device does not support the function it was purchased to complete, then the device is invalid – i.e. my knife no longer cuts beef because it is a new type of beef made in 2013 rings hollow. I want to be able to watch new movies and my guess is that this is an issue for many Samsung product owners.

we checked in with Samsung about the current status of this player, but haven’t heard back yet. We’ll let you know when we do.

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