Blu Ray Disc Players

When someone says about Blu-Ray disc player, a few things that initially come to your mind are, its incredible full-HD images, mind blowing sound quality and five times the data capacity than that of the DVD discs. But now you can think of something else too. That is, it provides a whole new movie viewing experience that was made possible by the Final Standard Profile that adds features never seen before such as, Picture-In-Picture modes including the Audio mixing, Enhanced commentary, Peek Behind the Animation and Backstage Pass. With all these exiting features, comes the Panasonic DMP-BD30K Blu-Ray disc player.

This is the first dedicated Blu-ray player that has been launched in UK with the profile 1.1 features. DBP-BD30 is the successor of Panasonics DBP-BD10 that had superb features but expensive.

Design:

Panasonic DBP-BD30K Blu-Ray Player is a little appetiser in its cost when compared to its predecessor. For this, it had to pay the price of loosing the unbeatable build quality and high end sophism. Yet this cutting-edge kit has a hi-tech look and is stylish too. The disc tray, SD slots and the playback controls of the player are hidden by a couple of drop-down panels that are black on its fascia. The rear side of the player has a fine assortment of connections. The small panel covering the disk tray automatically flips down when you press the open/close toggle. Towards the right of the player’s face is a LCD display that has been designed to have a clear view being at a distance of seven feet.

Featuers:

The rear panel connectivity:
Panasonic’s DMP-BD30 is one of the first Blu-ray players that can output both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks in bitstream format, and this is done with the help of HDMI v1.3 output. This also provides Deep Colour, but your TV has support the pertinent software. This socket can also output 1080p pictures at 24fps, as well as 576p/480p, 720p, 1080i and 1080/60p. HDMI v1.3 supports HDMI CEC technology known as the ‘Viera Link’ by Panasonic. This player also offers upgrading of DVDs to 1080p, which gives your SD discs a new life. The other connections in the rear side includes a set of 5.1-channel analogue outputs, component, S-video and composite video outputs, a pair of analogue phonos and plus optical and coaxial digital audio outputs, are used for transferring regular Dolby Digital and DTS bit streams. This unit does not contain any decoders for Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD Master Audio, Dolby Digital Plus or DTS HD, so you can only get decoded Dolby Digital and DTS from these six-channel analogue outputs.

Profile 1.1- The Final Standard Profile:
The main feature included in this profile is the picture-in-picture feature that we discussed earlier. With this feature, the video commentaries appear in a sub screen as the movie is being played in the main screen. This also means that two audio tracks are going on at the same time which is mixed by DBP-BD30 but you can also turn off the secondary video if you want. The player comes with 256MB of local storage, 64kb of onboard non-volatilememory, with both the secondary audio and video decoders.

Compatibility:
Panasonic DMP-BD30K is compatible with a wide range of formats such as, AVCHD, MP3, DivX and JPEG, plus BD-RE, BD-R discs and all types of recordable DVDs and CDs. This unit can also play AVCHD and JPEG files that are stored in a SD card, by sticking it in the front mounted slot. Panasonic also figures out that this can also be used to download the bonus content from a movie site onto the SD card and play it in tandem with a Blu-ray disc.

Advanced technologies in use:
The player also has a wide range of advanced processing technologies on board. The UniPhier which is a video processor combines the Pixel Precision Progressive Processing for HD (P4HD) which boosts the sharpness of the picture with a PHL Reference Chroma Processor that up-samples colour information. At the same time the sound is also boosted using the Audio Re-Master technology. This technology retrieves sonic data lost during the compression process that is made use of in disc authoring. The player provides you with a lot of interesting functionalities such as setting the delay and channel levels for the speakers, a range of picture presets and adjustments and noise reduction settings. This player also has the Virtual Surround and Dialog Enhancer.

Remote control complementing the excellent menu system:
Panasonic DMP-BD30K Blu-Ray DVD Player has a class operating system. The menu system is designed with high level of simplicity. The main menu and the submenu are designed logically and the player responds swiftly to all the commands of the remote control. The remote control complements the hi-tech features of the player to its best. It has a very clear button layout and labelling. Some of the features of the player are sorted as mini-menus which can be called-up during the playback with the remote. This remote also sports dedicated buttons to control the Picture-In-Picture and secondary audio. The bottom half of the remote has a circular pad. As this player lacks the unwanted flip-down door of its predecessor, Panasonic was able to include the handy open/close button in the clicker. The blue colour of the buttons in the black layout helps you in its readability. The only blot that can be said about the remote is that, the setup button which is used frequently is placed at the bottom.

Performance:

The start-up time is much quicker than the other Blu-ray players. DMP-BD30K had no trouble with the BD-J menus. The only smirch that you would be annoyed when it operates is that the player would not resume the playback after you have pressed stop.

The player outputs the 1080p picture quality is a phenomenal way. The colours are brilliant and the details are also very sharp. The DMP-BD30k properly deinterlaces the signals of 1080i to 1080p without any artifacts or jaggies. Certain interesting clips of the behind the screen happenings are provided to us by the under the umbrella feature of PIP. There was a little problem with the PIP feature of audio mixing as at times during the loud scenes, the main soundtrack drowned out the commentary.

Panasonic DMP-BD30k blu ray disc player comes with a warranty of 12 months.

Panasonic DMP-BD30K DVD player is a phenomenal product with is major upsets being the absence of BD-live and high- resolution decoding. With its profile 1.1, DMP-BD30 rules the world of the current Blu-ray disc players.

Panasonic DMP-BD30K Blu-Ray Disc Player - Technical specification Details

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