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Simple and Quick
Date of Review: Apr 5, 2008
The Bottom Line: The BD 30 is a relatively inexpensive player capable of excellent performance. If you can live with it's limitations, it is worth trying.
What Is It?
The Panasonic BD30 is a single disc blu-ray player that can also be used to upconvert regular DVDs to near HD quality via an HDMI connection.
What s In The Box?
You get the player, an easy to use remote control with batteries, an instruction manual and a fairly useless composite audio/video cable.
Connections
To take maximum advantage of this player, you will need HDMI connections between it, a modern receiver or pre-processor that can decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio and a display with an HDMI connector. Although the BD 30 itself has no internal decoders for the advanced codecs, it can bitstream them to a receiver that has them. If you don t have such a receiver, you can still use an optical connection to pass on standard Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1.
Picture Quality
On a reference quality blu-ray disc, the overused word spectacular applies. I d suggest your first purchase after the player be a copy of Disney s Ratatouille. It is extremely well produced both in terms of picture quality (PQ) and audio quality (AQ).
On such a disc, the BD 30 produces a smooth, almost 3 dimensional picture with exceptional depth and clarity. Colors are saturated, but not unnatural (I m assuming a properly calibrated display). The difference between an actual blu-ray disc versus a standard quality one that is upconverted is readily apparent, even on a 720p display (which I happen to have). The BD 30 is capable of a full 1080p/24 frame per second output if you have a display that can do that.
There are user defined controls that allow you to tweak the picture to you own tastes, though I have found that the standard settings work just fine for me.
Audio Quality
Unfortunately, the Denon receiver I have, though not that old, doesn t have any of the advanced decoders mentioned above so all I get is standard Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1. However, I am running an optical connection to it, then sending the signal to a Rotel amplifier, then on to all Klipsch speakers and dual SVS subwoofers. The sound is more than acceptable. If and when I update the receiver, I d post any comments concerning improvements in the AQ.
Upconverting Standard DVDs
As spectacular as true HD is, it is unlikely that most people will be replacing their entire standard DVD collection. For me, there are certain titles I will want to double dip on when the blu-ray version is available. However, I personally mostly will be just buying new titles.
I ve read comments in various places that claim the BD30 is not that competent as an upconverting player. Well, I also happened to have a Toshiba A3 HD-DVD player that does upconversion, as well as a Sony NS75H (which I have previously reviewed on Epinions). The BD30 is at least as competent as the two of them. I m not sure what others believe are lacking. From what I have played, however, I m quite satisfied by its upconversion ability.
It is Fast, but Slow
That heading s not double-talk. Any blu-ray player, as well as the now defunct HD-DVD format, is more like a personal computer than a standard DVD player. That means there is an operating system that requires a boot up time that is sometimes measured in minutes rather than seconds. The same goes for blu-ray discs, especially those that employ Java for their menus. It could seriously take as much as 2 to 3 minutes before such a disc is ready to be viewed.
People buying their first blu-ray player may find that annoying. It just happens to be the state of the art at the moment. That said, the BD 30 is one of the fastest players on the market as of this writing. With my particular unit, boot time is about 35 seconds. The longest load time was with the aforementioned Ratatouille, but even that loaded in less than a minute.
Possible Issues
As competent as this player is, other than the lack of internal decoders for the advanced audio codecs, I should also mention that it lacks an Ethernet connection. That may or may not be an issue for some people. An Ethernet connection can be used to update the player s firmware via the internet (with the BD 30 you connect to the Panasonic site with a PC or Mac, download the firmware , burn a copy onto a CD, then update the player).
Other than firmware updates (which improve functionality), an Internet connection is also used for Profile 2.0 discs which have, or will have advanced features such as downloading new content, or allowing online gaming. The BD 30 can play Profile 1.1 discs which have picture in picture. However, it will never be able to utilize the advanced features of a Profile 2.0 (or BD Live ) disc. To clarify, it will play the movie just not any of the Internet only content. For some people, like me, that is irrelevant. I buy DVDs for the movie, maybe for the deleted scenes or bloopers, but that s it.
Conclusion
If you want to jump into high definition DVD, this is a solid performer that is capable of producing excellent picture quality. With the right equipment, it can also reproduce lossless audio. Finally, it can play Profile 1.1 picture in picture discs, and upconvert your standard DVDs (via HDMI) to where they will look almost HD. Though it will never be able to access the advanced features of a Profile 2.0 disc, that is something you d need to decide how valuable that is, and how much you d use that feature.
