Black crawly dots noticeable in the snow scenes in chapter 3 of Transformers, but also seen using the XBox 360 Elite HD-DVD HDMI playback at 1080p60
Some perceive this as a defect in the 5000, either
- Defect is either in design of video subsystem hardware or firmware
- Defect is in particular unit
Some perceptions are that this is worse on the 360
- Conjecture is that this has been attributed to the lack of dithering on the 360
- See Dithering below
Some conjecture is that this is compression artifact interaction with film grain
Tests of non-film originated source are not complete
Multiple independent A/B tests of the 5000 against other players is not complete.
Seen on HDMI and component (this eliminates cabling as the issue, but does not preclude back interaction due to an HDMI cable being plugged in. Need to test this)

Grey crawly noise on all screens, including Samsung logo, easiest seen in 50% grey of the DVE pixel phase screen.
XBox360 does not exhibit this.
There is a post with a link to video (watch out for free file hosting ads) in this post here
Seen on HDMI and component (this eliminates cabling as the issue, but does not preclude back interaction due to an HDMI cable being plugged in. Need to test this)

Resolution Downgrading

Reports of automatic downgrading of the resolution from 1080p60 to 1080i have come in
This may actually be the "HDMI Auto Detection Function" on page 21 of the manual that automatically downgrades the resolution to the highest supported by the sink according to HDMI version.
Investigations continue, but this may actually be proper (but annoying) operation which is not defeatable.

DVD Scaling

Non-anamorphic 4x3 DVD content is being stretched to 16x9, and cannot be defeated.
Viewing of anamorphic window-boxed 4x3 DVD content is unaffected, since the base video image is 16x9 and to the player is indistinguishable from all other anamorphic 16x9 content