Panasonic DMP-BD50 Blu-ray player reviewed by Chris Mccraw

May 29, 2008

Design:

This player's design is pure understatement. The simple rectangular component sports a LED display on the bottom half of its face. In the upper right section there are some basic playback controls. On the top of the player are two critical buttons--open/close and power--which can be somewhat irksome if you're planning to stack components.

Remote Control:

The remote for this player is probably the best remote we've seen packaged with a high-definition disc player. It largely resembles the Philips TV remotes--which we're not huge fans of--but this one gets a lot right. At the very top is an illuminated strip of device names and you select which device you want the remote to control by scrolling through them with the Select button. The directional pad is easy to use with the appropriate buttons littered around it. There are convenient rocker buttons to control TV channels and volume. We also like the way the remote felt in our hand; it has some weight to it and feels solid.

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:

We started off our test looking at Corpse Bride in 1080p on this player. This disc is extremely sharp and any difference in detail between the players should be visible. We found it very difficult to find any significant differences in the image quality between the players. This is even more so the case when watching at a standard viewing distance of around 8 feet for a 50-inch plasma. We took a look at some test patterns on Silicon Image's HQV test suite on Blu-ray in 1080p mode on both players. Like we said before there's really very little difference in Blu-ray performance among all Blu-ray players.

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Rating: