Panasonic DMP-BD30E Blu-ray player reviewed by Harry Corzine

May 12, 2008

Design:

Like many of its precedessor designs this player looks shiny and high tech. The front panel features a glossy black finish that's prone to fingerprints. There are only On/Off button coupled with directional pad for forward and reverse operation. There are plenty of LED lights to indicate operations.

Remote Control:

The included remote looks cheap at first glance. he bottom half of the remote is distinguished by its combination directional pad/scroll wheel. The slippery wheel makes navigating with the directional keypad unnecessarily annoying and far too easy to accidentally spin into scan mode--you have to hit the Play button for it to resume playing at normal speed. Buying a good universal remote is recommended.

Features:

This player can play back both Blu-ray and standard DVD discs as well as standard audio CDs. There's no support for either of the niche high-resolution audio formats. Soundtrack support is adequate for a Blu-ray player but somewhat disappointing when compared to Toshiba's HD DVD players. This player has built-in decoding for standard Dolby Digital and DTS as well as Dolby Digital Plus which is a slightly higher resolution format of Dolby Digital. This player has no support for those highest-resolution next- gen audio formats. The connectivity of this player is nearly comprehensive for a Blu-ray player. The highlight is the HDMI jack which is capable of outputting both high definition video (up to 1080p at either 24 or 60 frames per second) and multichannel high resolution audio.

Performance:

This player evinced middling performance. It didn't pass the Film Resolution Loss Test. as the edges of one of the boxes exhibited strobe-like behavior--we've seen other players perform worse. We could see some minor moire in the grandstands of Raymond James Stadium but otherwise it did an acceptable job. It had no problem passing the Video Resolution Loss Test demonstrating its competence on video-based material. On M:I:III it did well by showing no moire on the stairs at the beginning of Chapter 8. We also looked at some movies in 24 frames per second output. The output at 24 frames was not as flawless as it should have been. We saw quite a few instances of stuttering that wasn't present when we had set at standard 1080p/60 mode.

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