Panasonic's new Blu-ray player won't be their last

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 28 February 2008 14:04

Opinion and Analysis

The ‘Final’ BD Profile 1.1 gives Blu-ray some of the features HD DVD players had as standard, allowing BD Profile 1.1 compatible movies and players to output special features, such as Picture-in-Picture for watching the director or actors comment on scenes, and audio mixing to bring the sound of the director talking to the fore, and putting the movie audio to the background.

If connected to a compatible TV, the DMP-BD30 can output in ‘up to’ 68.7 billion colours using 12-bit 4,096 step gradation. This means richer, smoother imagery and if your TV is up to it, it’s a welcome feature.

To get the full benefit of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD audio in bitstream form, you will need a compatible AV receiver, but you’ll then hear “studio-master-quality sound” – as long as your speakers are up to scratch, too.

The DMP-BD30 also uses Panasonic’s own ‘UniPhier’ chip, a “single-chip integration technology” which helped to make this Blu-ray player much slimmer than earlier models.

The SD card slot naturally can hold JPEG images, but can also play back HD video recorded in the AVCHD video format used by Sony, Panasonic and others in the latest HD camcorders.

CNET in Australia has physically reviewed this Blu-ray player and have noted that it handles difficult scenes quite well – their hands-on review is worth reading if you’re a Blu-ray videophile.

So if you’ve got to have the latest Blu-ray player with the 1.1 profile, and are happy to buy a replacement in the future, the DMP-BD30 looks like a great interim Blu-ray player, although it certainly won’t be your ‘final’ player.

And for those who aren’t absolute video purists, the question still is – why not just buy a PS3 instead, which surely will be fully upgradeable to the BD Profile 2.0 in the future?