New Blu-ray player Panasonic DMP-BD10 reviewed by Anne Bainbridge

August 31, 2008

I have a Panasonic DMP-BD10, and PS3. In the 15 days that I've had this player, it's done a terrific job on video and audio quality. I'm playing it on a 49" Hitachi connected through HDMI. I've never had any of the stutters or other audio/video glitches that others have mentioned. This player takes by far the longest of my three players to load movies and simply responding to an eject/open request takes 30 seconds for some reason. The BR players are all updatable so it's possible to play the latest movies. However, this player has a VERY unintuitive failure mode and upgrade procedure. Since Bluray is still in its infancy (so-to-speak) there aren't many options for players.

Other nice features of this player include variety of media: You can play not only standard music CDs (a given) but also MP3 discs. For those who wonder if it will play homemade Blu-Ray DVDs I can report that I have sucessfully created a Blu-Ray DVD with menus on a 25G Single Layer BD-RE (Rewritable) disk using the LG GGW-H20L burner. One drawback that keeps this unit from being perfect is no ethernet connectability for firmware upgrading. It is my opinion that this player was released prematurely based on its feature set. This player did a great job on the Bluray compatibility & picture quality and the DVD upconversion quality. This player is good as far as disks that work on it but it does not support 48kHz/24-bit HD true sound that other blu-ray disks come with. The sound will pop out of sync with the visual. Before you buy call the manufacturer and ask if they have solved this problem by issuing a firmware (disk to put in the machine to update the harddrive) or not.

Upconversion on this player is great, which is very important if you have vast library of DVDs. I figured instead of spending $100 or so on upconvert DVD player to work with my new TV, I decided to go directly to Blu-Ray, since the Blu-Ray is now standard of HD DVDs. I found that the picture quality is great and the upconversion quality is superb for this player. Overall, I found this player to be competent Blu-ray player and a great upconverting DVD player.

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