[ Music ]
>> Hi, I'm Mathew Moskovciak associate editor at CNET.com and this is the Panasonic DMPBD30k. This is Panasonic's newest Blu Ray Player and it's also the first Blu Ray Player that is Blu Ray profile 1.1 compliant. Now, 1.1 compliant means that it'll be able to play new Blu Ray discs coming out next year that have advanced features such as picture and picture mode. Now, the design on this new Panasonic Player is much improved over the previous model. The old model had an annoying flip down panel that you had to manually push down every time you wanted to access the disc tray. But, this one is completely automatic so that's not a problem. Another improved design aspect is the remote, which is much simpler to use. One of the things that it lacks is the scroll wheel on the previous models, which made it very easy to accidentally access rewind or fast forward just when you pick up the remote. Now, one of the most important things on high definition disc players is soundtrack support, which is kind of a good news bad news story with this Panasonic player. The good news is that it has bit stream output for high resolution soundtracks. The bad news is that it doesn't have any internal decoding. Looking around back, you'll notice that there is an HGMI output. You'll also notice that it has analogue multi channel outputs. Moving on to performance, we are very impressed with the 1080P output on this player which is especially nice since on other inexpensive Blu Ray Players we have seen some issues with 1080 ID interlacing. On standard DVDs, we weren't as impressed. Overall, it's still hard to recommend the standard Blu Ray Player when the PlayStation 3 is available at 400 dollars. But, if you wanna go for a standalone player and profile 1.1 is something that's important to you Panasonic is a pretty good choice. I'm Matt Moskovciak from CNET.com and this is the Panasonic DMPBD30k.
^M00:01:55
[ Music ]
