Panasonic DMP-BD85K (photos)
Panasonic's DMP-BD85K has great image quality and its 7.1 analog outputs are a nice plus, but it's slow and less featured than competing models.
Panasonic DMP-BD85K
The DMP-BD85K is the midrange player in Panasonic's 2010 Blu-ray line, and it corrects for many of errors the company made with last year's model by including a USB Wi-Fi adapter and adding Netflix--as well as Pandora in the future--to its streaming content portal, VieraCast.
On the other hand, Panasonic still seems to be a step behind the competition as built-in Wi-Fi is now the norm, and Samsung and LG offer more streaming services, and the DMP-BD85K wound up feeling sluggish compared to other 2010 Blu-ray players.
If you need 7.1 analog audio outputs, the DMP-BD85K is one of the few affordable players still offering it, but otherwise we couldn't find much to recommend it over competitors such as the LG BD570 or Sony BDP-S570.