Why You Can Trust CNET Panasonic SC-PT865W review: Panasonic SC-PT865W
It's got a few weak points, but movie buffs with large DVD libraries will find this a great way to add surround sound to their home theatre set-ups — particularly if wireless rear speakers are a necessity.
Design
Panasonic's SC-PT865W home-theatre-in-a-box (HTIB) system is designed to look compatible with the company's Viera big screen TVs, but with its classic black components, it should coordinate nicely with most any of the big screens on the market right now. Even with four 1,123x252x235mm tall boy speakers and a large 361x181x315mm subwoofer, the system isn't visually overpowering, and it blended in surprisingly well in the home environment we tested it in. The centre speaker is surprisingly small at 94x270x95mm. More on this later.
Panasonic SC-PT865W
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Unfortunately, the sophisticated design of the speakers and DVD player is not matched in the remote control. A squat, grey plastic-y number, the remote is jammed with a multitude of buttons — all arguably needed as the HTIB has a fair range of controllable modes and features, but the form factor surely could have been elongated to provide more space between the tiny rows of buttons so you didn't have to squint at the thing to be sure you were pressing the right one. There is no back light, but most annoyingly, the oft-used mute button is buried at the bottom of the remote and is not easy to find and press in a hurry.
Features
Feature wise, the SC-PT865W more than pulls its weight.
If you've got polished floorboards or your TV sits in an open plan room, getting a surround sound system has always been problematic, as running speaker wires across the lounge in that type of situation is both unsightly and dangerous. Many early wireless HTIBs simply weren't very good, and as consumers walked away, so did the companies that offered them.
Thankfully, Panasonic's come up with a workable solution. The kit includes a small box that wirelessly receives Radio Frequency transmissions from the centre speaker. As it needs power, we placed this transmitter behind our sofa near a power point and then connected it (with supplied thin speaker cable) to the rear speakers located roughly on the sides of the lounge. Voila! Surround sound without cables running from the front to the back of the room. It works much better than line-of-sight-systems, where obstructions such as a dog or child standing between the speakers could cause drop outs. Although it uses the potentially crowded 2.4GHz band, we experienced no interference during our testing period.
The SC-PT865W has a nifty integrated iPod dock. While many other systems require you hook-up (and pay extra for) an external dock if you want to play your iPod music and videos through it, in this case the dock is cleverly built-in to the DVD unit. A small cover on the front flips down, and the iPod dock sits nicely on this small ledge. You can use the HTIB's on-screen display and the aforementioned remote to control the iPod's content, plus the terminal will recharge your iPod. (NB: to play iPod video, you'll have to connect the SC-PT865W with composite cable to your TV — it will not work through HDMI.) This compartment also conceals a UBS port, so you can also play MP3, WMA, JPEG and MPEG4 files stored on portable USB devices. While we're talking playback formats, the DVD player itself supports DVD-video, DVD-RAM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, VCD, CD and CD-R/RW as well. Did we mention is has an AM/FM tuner as well?
On the connections front, it has HDMI out, so the player supports up-conversion of DVDs to 1080p high-definition resolution. There is also a digital audio (optical) input, so if you're connecting to other devices like a gaming console or Foxtel iQ2, you can transmit digital sound through the 5.1 speaker system.
Finally, the HDMI connection enables what Panasonic calls Viera-Link, which means that if you have a Viera TV, you can control both it and the HTIB through its one (cluttered) remote control.
Performance
Once you've got the system set up, you can check/optimise your speakers with its included sound calibration microphone. The mic cord was a bit short to reach the "main" seating position in our test lounge, and the adjustments made after using this auto calibration set-up did not seem to be significant.
The front three speakers and the subwoofer sport generous audio output of 250 watts each, while the two rear speakers are rated at 125 watts. This is ample sound to fill even large rooms — indeed you'll probably be turning the volume down from levels you'd normally listen to.
The Kelton subwoofer should please those who like their bass booming. You can adjust the bass levels in the sub (another button on the remote!) to suit your preference from three options, from robust to rattle the lampshades.
Panasonic uses bamboo diaphragms in the woofer and tweeter cones of the centre and front speakers. This is supposed to provide crisper dialogue and while this works to some extent, we still feel that the small physical size of the centre speaker limits the sound impact that it should have. Obviously, this HTIB is geared toward movies, but if you're going to be watching standard-definition television at all, you'll find dialogue from the SC-PT865W's slim centre speaker inadequate and will want to switch back to your TV's internal speakers.
Movies, of course, fare much better in both sound and vision. We viewed our well-watched scenes in King Kong and found the dinosaur battles extremely detailed, even in dark scenes, and did not notice any judder in the final aeroplane attack on Kong in New York. Testing the SC-PT865W with the animated movie Happy Feet, we found the upscaled colours vivid and the black of the penguin coats quite detailed. We should give a plug to the speakers on this one too — the tap dancing sequences sounded remarkably crisp and the big choir numbers full and rich.
While the iPod playback capabilities are a nice bonus, the flat sound of compressed music through this 5.1 speaker system is adequate at best, even using Dolby Pro-Logic II Music mode. It would do in a pinch if you were having a party perhaps, but for serious music appreciation, you'd have to look elsewhere.
All up the SC-PT865W is a nice way to add surround sound and DVD upscaling capabilities to your big screen TV, but if you've got a 1080p model, you're going to eventually want a Blu-ray player. It bears striking similarities to (swankier looking) Sony's DAV-F500, but it's a full AU$800 cheaper and throws in the iPod dock to boot.