Sound & Vision Magazine - Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-ray Disc player

Now that Blu-ray Disc has vanquished HD DVD after a nearly 2-year battle in the marketplace, the dust has finally settled — right into the eyes of everyone who put off buying a high-def disc player. Understandably, many of these dawdlers will be squinting first at the more affordable Blu-ray prospects in the entry-level $400-to-$500 range. At $500 list, Panasonic's DMP-BD30 comes to play in the Blu-ray budget sandbox — and brings plenty of toys along with it.

A follow-up to the company's $1,300 DMP-BD10, the BD30 is the first Blu-ray player that's fully compliant with the BD-ROM Profile 1.1 technical standard. Among the improvements over Profile 1.0 players is the inclusion of more local memory storage (a minimum 256 kilobytes vs. 64 kb in Profile 1.0) and more video and audio decoders. Translation: Out of the box, the BD30 plays the interactive picture-in-picture extras now arriving on some Profile 1.1 Blu-ray Discs. Starting this year, though, all new players carrying the Blu-ray logo have to be 1.1 compliant, so Panasonic won't be alone for long here.

The Short Form

Sleek design, solid HD video performance, and fast operation make this a good value among standalone Blu-ray Disc players.

Plus

• Sleek industrial design
• Fast load times
• BD Profile 1.1 for interactive features
• Bitstream output of advanced audio formats

Minus

• No onboard decoding of advanced audio formats
• No Ethernet connection
• Less than stellar DVD upconversion

Key Features

• Meets BD Profile 1.1 standard
• 1080p/24-fps video output
• HDMI 1.3 output
• Passes Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstreams for outboard processing
• SD card slot for JPEG or AVCHD playback
• Outputs: HDMI, component video, S-video, composite video, optical/coaxial digital audio, 5.1-channel analog audio, stereo analog audio
• 16 x 2 3/8 x 12 5/8 in; 7 3/8 lb

Along with future-readiness, Panasonic went for a futuristic look in its second-gen model. The sleek BD30 sports a low, 2 3/8-inch profile and a glossy black front completely free of clutter. A flip-down door on the right side hides transport keys and a new feature: an SD memory card slot that can be used for viewing jpeg images or high-def camcorder footage recorded in the AVCHD format. To the left of this is the disc tray, well camouflaged behind the player's facade.

Around back, the jack-pack includes the requisite HDMI and component-video outputs, along with outputs for both optical and coaxial digital audio and for 5.1-channel RCA analog audio. What you won't find is an Ethernet jack for connecting the player to the Internet for firmware upgrades and title-specific interactive features — but most Blu-ray players still don't have this jack, so Panasonic isn't alone here. Also missing is onboard decoding for the new lossless audio formats, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. However, the HDMI Version 1.3 output allows these soundtracks to pass from the disc as an unaltered bitstream for processing by one of the new receivers with advanced audio decoding. It will also pass an uncompressed PCM soundtrack to receivers with older versions of HDMI that can decode multichannel PCM audio (many do).

I liked Panasonic's straightforward remote, but it wasn't without its issues. While the Stop/Pause/Play buttons are centrally located, the critical four-way navigation pad was too low for comfortable reach by the thumb on my average-sized hand. And while there are large keys for Top Menu and Pop-Up Menu, the basic Menu key that exists on every other standard DVD-player remote is omitted here. This command is required on some regular DVDs to bypass trailers and jump to the main disc menu, but to gain access to it with the BD30, you have to hit a Sub Menu button and then navigate to the Menu option in a small onscreen menu. This is awkward and inconvenient, to say the least.

SETUP

Hooking up the BD30 was as simple as running an HDMI cable from the player to a late-generation Pioneer receiver, and another HDMI cable from the receiver to the 50-inch Pioneer plasma I used as a monitor. I set the BD30's video menu for 1080p/24-frame output, which the Pioneer plasma happily accommodated. And since the receiver could decode a Dolby TrueHD bitstream, I set the BD30's audio setup menu to its Bitstream option and its Secondary Audio option to Off. This last step is necessary because the main soundtrack and secondary audio streams (presumably from a Blu-ray Disc's extras) must all be in the PCM digital audio format to facilitate mixing for simultaneous playback. But since the player's decoder can't do onboard TrueHD-to-PCM conversion, it grabs the core Dolby Digital bitstream from within the TrueHD track and works off that. Bottom line: You can hear the highest-fidelity TrueHD audio at the sacrifice of full interactivity or you can have full interactivity with standard Dolby Digital sound.

The BD30 impressed me right out of the gate with its zippy operation and clean handling of discs. The Panasonic is fast, as high-def players go. Without a disc loaded, the boot time from power-up to the ready screen was only 20 seconds, and most Blu-ray Discs I tried required only 45 to 50 seconds to go from the close of the tray to the FBI warning. Standard DVDs took 20 to 25 seconds to load and start playing.

High-def image quality for Blu-ray titles on the BD30 was spectacular, and completely in line with what I've seen on our reference TV from other HD DVD and BD players. Across the Universe, a rock musical based on the Beatles repertoire and set in the turbulent '60s, delivered a range of stunning images, from the subtle, gray dankness of the working-class Liverpool that birthed the Fab Four to the brighter, uplifting tones of the sun-drenched American landscape.

In one early scene on a high-school football field, the Dayton Wildcats and their cheerleaders practice in vivid dark-green uniforms emblazoned with a deep taxicab-yellow W that nearly leapt from the screen. When the camera zoomed in for a close-up of one of the cheerleaders singing a slow cover of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," I could clearly see the layer of pancake makeup on her face.

The sound from this disc's Dolby TrueHD track (as confirmed by the receiver's front-panel display) was what I've come to expect from uncompressed PCM or TrueHD tracks heard via the onboard decoding in other players. That is, it was clean, incredibly dynamic, and exhibited the uncanny openness that seems to separate lossless from traditional lossy (core Dolby Digital and DTS) compression.

I was similarly satisfied with the crisp, vivid look of the animation in Meet the Robinsons and the well-mixed surround effects from that disc's uncompressed PCM soundtrack. But I was able to confirm earlier reports that, in an odd quirk, the BD30's subwoofer channel measures about 5 to 6 dB lower in level when delivered via HDMI instead of through the optical or coaxial bitstream output. This could make it hard to set levels to match other digital components in a system, but Panasonic has since addressed the issue in its latest Version 1.6 firmware upgrade, released in late February and available through the company's Web site. (Google "BD30 firmware download" and find the URL that begins "panasonic.jp/support.") This upgrade also addressed HDMI incompatibility issues encountered with some Samsung HDTVs, while earlier firmware upgrades mostly addressed title-specific playback issues.

While Blu-ray content via the BD30's component-video output (at that output's maximum resolution of 1080i) also looked crisp, standard-def DVDs were another matter. Films like The Rookie and the Legends of Jazz TV series (shot in high-def video and downscaled for DVD) generally looked very good. But the BD30's upconversion of 480i to either 1080i or 1080p 24/60 looked subtly softer than what I'm used to seeing from the best upconverting high-def players. This isn't a deal breaker, though. The Panasonic also showed some jaggies (breakup on diagonal lines) on the torture tests found on the Silicon Optix HQV test disc. It also showed unusually bad breakup of the alpha characters on that disc's horizontal screen-crawl test, which scrolls video across film-based material as you might see with a TV newsflash. But that condition should never come up in disc-based content.

This being a Profile 1.1 player, I fired up one of the few BD-ROM 1.1 discs out there, Resident Evil: Extinction, and checked out its picture-in-picture function. When you engage this extra, a box occasionally appears on-screen featuring the director or one of the actors adding live commentary while the movie continues to run in the background. (The soundtrack is lowered so it doesn't interfere with the commentary.) This worked flawlessly in my audition, and Panasonic continues to address any PIP glitches it encounters in its firmware upgrades.

BOTTOM LINE

Blu-ray Disc players selling for less than $500 are still scarce — Sony's PS3 game console, which starts at less than $400, remains one of the best values around. But among standalone models, you'll be hard-pressed to find a $500 player that's as pretty to look at or as well equipped, or that works as smoothly as Panasonic's DMP-BD30. It's not without its compromises, and it'll no doubt be seeing a lot of new competition this year. But for now, this is a quite recommendable entry in a narrow field.