tomusa's Full Review: Panasonic DVD-LS55 7 in. Portable DVD Player
I bought this unit from Amazon.com in January 2005. Amazon did not post my review or any others that were not completely supportive. The Panasonic DVD-LS55 turned out to be a disappointment due to its unrealized potential.
Like most, I don't like wires on portable equipment. I don't like useless features. I don't want to have headphone wires, power wires, or antenna wires tethering me to devices or to an automobile. So the large battery and FM transmitter looked like good features. I could even see myself getting a pair of FM headphones to use with this unit. Fat chance.
The FM transmitter is too weak to overpower the weak static of FM stations over the unit's entire FM frequency range (88.3 to 90.3 MHz in 0.1 MHz steps). This is true for the car and in the home with a variety of FM receivers. To get it to work at all, I had to hold it up to the antenna or put it into contact with the radio. This is quite unlike my friend’s iPOD which comes in crystal clear until you start driving around. This $100 feature over the DVD-LS50 was a disappointment. So the big draw for the LS55, a wireless unit that works with the car FM radio, was not realized.
The very narrow viewing angle of the LCD screen would not be objectionable if I didn't have to tilt the screen to about 20 degrees off perpendicular to view dark scenes. This introduces reflections or glare from overhead room lighting, so you have to raise the unit to an uncomfortable height for best viewing. You can't view this screen directly on as one might imagine as the dim areas blend in to a uniform black. There is no electronic adjustment for viewing angle or contrast to compensate. The colors, intensity, and contrast are fine when viewed at an angle, but there is graininess in the picture that does not dissolve until viewed from a distance greater than what's desirable for this unit. Let's face it, if you wanted to enjoy movies with your family or a friend, and picture size or quality was important, you would watch your DVDs on something other than a portable.
Be careful not to drop the unit as you try to pry the screen away from the body. It's much harder to open than a thin CD case as there are no edges to grasp. At first I couldn't put a disk on the spindle sending me to the manual. The pressure required to snap a disk on is excessive and it makes me cringe every time I do it.
Who wouldn't want to put 1000 of your favorite CD song titles encoded into MP3 format onto a single DVD for use in this unit? There may be potential there, but it didn't recognize my MP3 DVDs. I don't have the time, inclination or money to trouble shoot this with a variety of DVD burning software, recorders, and media. I'm not a geek and it's not appealing to me to find out how. Web searches reveal little about any possible solution. Panasonic makes no recommendation. Basically if it doesn't work when you try it, give up. If anybody has a solution for real MP3 audio playback burned onto DVDs with this unit they can post it.
I have tried a variety of purchased original music CDs with this unit and it plays them all. The song titles work for a few of them, but most display only track numbers.
On the plus side, the unit does not pause, flicker or jitter and the controls are not needlessly cluttered or confusing. Motion artifacts are nearly imperceptible. The mechanicals are clean and the style is appealing. The unit emits little motor whir which is unnoticeable with the sound on. There is no mute on the unit or remote. The cinema modes and AV enhancer have only minor visual affect on the picture and I can do without those. Features like artifact-free video and audio play speeds from 60% to 140% work fine, but probably will not get much use. The screen has no stuck illuminated pixels. The dark parts of the picture have little contrast but are not annoyingly gray, and cinema modes have little effect except to make these areas foggy gray-brown, another feature that I could do without. Contrast in bright scenes is truly excellent. Most of the necessary features are accessible on the main unit. So I'll be leaving the remote control home. If you want a compact unit to view DVD movies on the go, then this unit will do fine. The battery capacity is its best feature that actually works.
A JPEG picture CD-R plays a slide show of digital camera pictures, and stills, but a lot of detail is lost on this screen that you would enjoy on a monitor or a laptop. JPEG colors are artificially intensified and contrast suffers when compared with a monitor. Thumbnail views load so slowly I consider this feature useless as you can cycle through full screen pictures just as quickly.
Data CD-RWs with high resolution jpegs camera images load images in 13 to 18 consecutive bars, taking up to 6 seconds per picture, much to slow to make a decent slideshow for a sizeable number of pictures. You should budget a good deal of your time to compressing your pictures if you intend to use this device for viewing your digital still photo-album pictures. It makes you long for the good old days of film and hardcopy photo albums which are vastly more flexible, easier to access, and have better images. Go ahead and use maximum compression as it is unlikely to introduce any noticeable degradation on this screen.
Panasonic once again has compromised performance where it counts, to save battery life, and processor cost. The unit does not get viruses, need upgrades, or hang up and need to be rebooted like your laptop, but it's still no substitute. It tries my patience to use this player for anything other than viewing store bought movie DVDs or listening with headphones to store bought CDs. One could argue that the JPEG picture viewing might suffice in a pinch for someone with greater patience.
No I did not try CDs with MP3s. This is because I want to be able to put an entire music collection of almost 60 CDs onto a DVD verses the 10 I can put on a CD. Call me fussy but CD storage will fall out of favor long before DVDs.
Update June 5 2005 - 3 months later:
CDs with MP3 work fine so I can use this unit. But my opinion stands. I have confirmed that the native format MP3 DVD-RAM disks also do not play in this unit. Nero Express 6 was used with various data disk, and MP3 settings. I could have bought a nice iPod for the money. If anyone knows of any portable battery powered players of MP3 DVDs (any format), I'm all ears. There goes my MP3 DVD music archive aspirations.
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