gozumm's Full Review: Panasonic DMP-BD60K Blu-Ray Player
For the executive summary, read only the bolded items. Last update regards audio.
If you've been holding back on a Blu-ray Disk, or BD, player because of reported player quirks by many brands, updates to the BD standard, player price, movie cost and availability, the time may have come to upgrade. A BD player has arrived that is as robust as any top DVD player. However, if you don't have a flat screen TV over 30 inches and one that supports 1080p resolution, the upgrade may not be worth it. BD is best with a big screen, and it will give you better sound too. BD is the highest resolution available for home video, if you're not sure its for you, see a short primer at the bottom.
Sellers Market? High Praise for Some Problematic Players
Since 2006, many owners have been willing to live with variable quality units for BD's higher image quality. Reviewing epinions alone, there are a good number of BD players that receive 4 star ratings for picture performance, but often cost over $400, have poor menu functions, at times refuses to play other blu-ray disks, require firmware fixes, die early and get spotty support from manufacturers. A reliable electronic device should be trouble free for at least 5 years, and few BD players are that age yet. Thus, finding a good bet is not an easy job. Equally, 'value' BD players for under $100 have, at this time, are often a combination of poor performers and poor reliability.
After 30 years of owning electronics, I find Panasonic products have often had a high reputation for reliability at lower cost, often better than Sony. The BD60 is the successor of the year old BD35 and criticized in editorial reviews as a rehashed BD35. BD60 carries forward the BD35's reputation and assume its guts have been field tested for near a year in the consumer market. The BD60 itself has been out for over 3 months with excellent user reviews elsewhere.
BD60
The BD60 has a lot of features, but I'll focus on core issues for a player: the quality of its video, audio and ease of use. While much is made about other capacities within competing DB players such as built in WiFi, multiformat support, Netflix, YouTube, VOD etc., that a BD player should support, lower cost PC based alternatives easily provide these capacities more flexibly than an appliance, these features are acessorial and should be minor criteria for how a BD player is judged. Most of these add-ons have little to do with outputing BD quality programs. PC Blu-ray decoding takes effort to configure that its cost rival a stand alone DB player while remaining problematic if a PC is over 2 years old.
In the Box
The BD player looks and feels like an ordinary DVD player: its as large weights similarly too. Users manual, warranty, quick set up, RCA cables, 2xAA batteries, remote, and AC cord are included. There is no HDMI or component cable included.
Setup
Similar to a DVD player. Just plug in your cable between the TV and the BD60. For best image and ease of use, one should use an HDMI cable, best if certified 1.3. However, I used 'generic' HDMI cables I paid $3 for, and it works well. Just plug the power cable in, and you are done.
When the unit first turns on, it asks for basic setup defaults to be answered. I ran a movie directly without selecting a basic setup and it ran perfectly. Until you know what the settings do, one can use factory default settings.
Disk Load
The slowness of disk loading is a alleged BD 60 player complaint. My disk load time is under 1 minute, typically 30 seconds. Its longest only if the BD has to start up from power off. There is a quick load feature, but this keeps the unit partially powered on, so the phantom power is 6 watts OFF, versus 0.5 watts if the quick load feature is off.
Disk Freeze
Random short period pause of video is an alleged BD 60 complaint. I have had 8 under 5 second random pauses during playback after over 80 hours of playing programs. It appears like someone hit the pause button by accident, and the unit starts playing again after a short time out. The locations of the pause are random, are not-reproducible. However, I have consistently been able to induce it to occur on HD material on the 'bonus tracks' that are HD but not 24 fps. Turning off the 24 fps feature seems to help on these tracks. I have not had the issue happen with material supporting 24 fps. There may be a firmware fix for this issue.
Remote
The remote is ugly but very ergonomic. It was far easier to program my basic Sharp TV control codes into it that most remotes. Its buttons are logically arranged, and good sized for fingertips, so its easy to find related functions for menus and its unlikely you'll press the wrong button by mistake. I can find the right buttons on feel alone, something I can't do very well on my Sharp remote.
Unlike instant response from DVD remotes, there is a noticeable delay between played movies and some menu items, such as fast forwarding. This delay is far less on DVD disks. My DVD player remembers were I left off when entering most player functions, while the BD60 may restart the disk.
Menu Items
The menu items are a very clear bright sharp font, that matches the best resolution of my TV, far better than any DVD player I've seen anywhere. Good menus do not require one to refer to the manual to understand what they do, and I can do this 75% of the time. Unfortunately, you still need to read the manual to understand the network setup, the player limitations, and Viera settings. The best menu's I've used are in Sony products, were I'd refer to the manual only 10% of the time. Compared to the Sony, it takes more button clicks to adjust the BD60 settings but it has identical adjustments.
Blu Ray Playback
A few movies are consistently rated as BD demonstration disks, HBOs Band of Brothers, BBC's Planet Earth, and the Wolfgang Peterson movie "Troy", to name a few. Both the BD35 and BD60 have been reported to play most any BD that sometimes refuses to play, for unknown reasons, on other models. I have not found a single review of these players locking up during playback, require a firmware upgrade to play a main movie, nor suffer a major malfunction since September, 2008.
For this review, I'll describe only Troy compared to its DVD version. I ran the BD version and DVD version side my side, and made AB comparisons between the BD60 and my DVD player. I then selectively played the same DVD scenes to compare the BD60 DVD upconversion compared to my DVD player.
The playback and quality is incomparable. In well made BDs, the images of people appear like said person is standing in front of you, but reduced to 2 dimensions; its thus more than a superb photo, larger than life yet not truly real. Landscapes, in the right angle, appear near real, like you are truly there. Details are high enough that, having been to real stone ruins and castles in my life, what appears as stone fortresses in Troy appear more like Disneyland props on BD compared to the illusion provided by the DVD. The images of water appear more true to life in BD and that one can detect a subtle 'wierdness' is some water scenes and suspect computer graphics were used. Viewers can discern weave and fabric types on clothing worn by actors, and literally count strands of hair on heads and bearded faces. Texture abounds in all items in a image, where a DVD reveals the same as a smudge of color. In some diagonal lines, like spear shafts or arrows, subtle jagginess on DVD appear as straight lines on BD, and you can even tell the texture of wood on the arrows and spears! BD imagry makes the visual experience of a program highly compelling, even if the program's content is of marginal quality.
DVD Playback
Compared to my Sony DVD player, the upconversion of DVD is identical. The same artifacts are present on both players, such as lack of texture in scenes shown by BD material or jagged lines in the same scenes with arrows and spears. While the BD60 plays DVDs burned to both the DVD-R and R standards, my Sony DVD plays more of the older formats.
Audio
The BD supports all common and newer sound codecs: Dolby Digital, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus, Digital DTS/DTS-HD Surround, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio, DTS-HD best over HDMI. It will play the best resolution available or selected. A common problem for 5.1 systems is the weakness of the center channel: voice is often drowned out by side noise. The BD60 has a center channel boost function that assists in making dialog easier to hear in some programs, I've found this function excellent. It has separate optical and analog audio outputs. The sound from BD is far sharper, crisper, and clearer compared to DVD, this maybe the 'uncompressed' codec BD supports. I compared both Troy and Planet Earth BD and DVD versions.
Other issues
BD60 renders JPGs very well. However, there is no zoom, only rotate and slide show. A PC based JPG viewer can show images as good as the BD60 and offer more configuration capacities.
Non-supported Video Formats: The BD60 does not support WMA, DivX, DVD-ROM, CD-ROM, SACD, Photo CD and others. However these resolutions are commonly lower quality, if not obsolete, and PCs can easily be configure to play nearly any digital multimedia format. Most of these other video formats do not have commercial grade video titles, often do not support advance audio, but if they did a configured video player can port 5.1 audio through a standard sound card. Higher quality DivX does exist, but Panasonic codecs are limited to 720p; PCs based decoding can do 1080p depending on CPU speed of your PC. Again, a key point is most of these videos are most often of lower quality than BD.
Streaming Video: while Netflix is not currently supported, streaming VOD resolution is typically 720p. It can be performed easily by a PC up to 1080p, should it be needed.
An SD card is used as buffer memory for extended features of a BD disk, if available, or to run supported media formats. USB cards play only supported file types, such as jpgs.
YouTube: Limited by the Viera Cast interface, Firefox is far more flexible. Note, most maximum resolutions available is 720p, half the capacity of the BD60, and easily within the range of a PC. However the PC also supports Hulu, and countless other sites. A typical high quality YouTube video is just MP4.
Is Blu-ray for You?
High Resolution is not Always Better
To this day, BD disk mastering at times provided marginal improvements over DVD imagery. This has led to a plethora of review sites comparing BD to DVD, so upgrading your old DVD collection is not automatic, and one should look into BD reviews before upgrading any current DVD collection. If original film material is in bad shape, a high resolution version simply reveals blemishes hidden by DVD so a remastering is like restoration, removing scratches and restoring coloration. Poor remastering is less likely to occur with newer film releases and until the video engineers focus on improving image quality rather than releasing material as soon as possible, what movie titles there is today in BD has been diluted by mediocrity.
Further, the format war between defunct "HD" and BD ended in early 2008 and hindered movie titles from being made in numbers, and as of this writing there are just about 1500 BD titles compared to 100,000 in DVD, according to thedigitalbits.com. However, with the sales of 1080p flat TVs ever growing as well as BD players, it maybe the momentum for rapid change will occur in 2009.
Since BD disks have 5-7x more data than DVD, its follows the resolution is as high. However, one cannot appreciate 5-7x more resolution if one's TV is incapable of resolving the resolution. If you consider a typical old large CRT TV began to reveal its imperfections at 30" for 480i with the old analog NTSC standard, then to see 1080p one needs at minimum, 30" TV, the larger the better, and a progressive scan 1080p decoder, which only became standardized about 2006. Similarly in audio, what good is 5.1 surround sound decoding without a surround sound system, how much more a 7.1 system?
BD Movies May Not Cost More
Many classic BD movies are being sold for near the same price as its DVD version, at least from Amazon.com. Basic BD movie boxes and inserts are more sparse compared to DVD, but disk data is the main thing, and the BD picture quality is potentially incomparable. With blank BD media running $4-5 for a 25GB disk, and near $10 for a single blank 50GB disk, new releases sold for $10-15 a disk are a bargain.
BD in Evolution
While BD disk format is standard, what the player is capable of doing with its data is in flux, and likely will have no end. Between 2006 and today, BD has seen new features through its "profiles", and as of this writing is at 2.0; 3.0 is already in progress. Therefore, a good BD player must have an upgrade path, but whether the average consumer can do it easily is another issue. The BD60 has a firmware upgrade option via its network connection or through a burned CD; reports of the upgrade process by other users is trouble-free.
Conclusion:
The BD60 shines as a basic BD player that is reputed to plays nearly all BD disks, a reputation for reliability, easy of use, superb images and sound. This is what any player should be. Hopefully, prices drop further to increase its mass appeal. The reported disk freeze problem has occurred with my unit, but it occurs rarely and transiently that I don't see it as a major flaw. However, it is a bug and needs a resolution but does not detract from the aesthetics of video playback.
Experience the Blu-rayâ„¢ difference with the DMP-BD60K Blu-ray Disc Player from Panasonic. It gives detailed images with brilliant color in full high...More at Dell
The Panasonic DMP-BD60K Blu-ray Disc Player provides Original Movie Quality in Your Living Room with the ability to play Blu-ray discs at up to 1080p,...More at J&R Music and Computer World
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2010 Shopping.com, Inc.