[Ben_Williams]

$500 Blu-Ray players are going to be a necessary thing if this format expects to survive. The sooner the better! Of course, one could always argue that there will be a $500 Blu-Ray player (PS3) available on November 17th as well... too bad you have to know somebody to get one.

[Dave Moritz]

I just took a better look at the Panasonic today and while the store I went to only was using component video. The picture from the Panasonic was very impressive. They had the Panasonic Bluray, Panasonic Reciever, 60" + Panasonics HDTV and speakers. I did not care one bit about the reciever or speakers. But the TV and Bluray player where impressive. The salesman even comented that he could not believe the where using the component video instead of using the HDMI so it could display 1080p instead of 1080i.

They even had a Pioneer Bluray player on display but since I was on lunch break I did not have the time to ask them to show something on the Pioneer. Unless something changes in reguards to internal lossless decoding and 7.1 analog outs being offered on the Pioneer or Sony Bluray. I have decided that the Panasonic Bluray will find a home in my HT.

Unless Denon comes out with a Bluray player with all the features of the Panasonic, but I am not going to hold my breath.

[Grant H]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ben_Williams

$500 Blu-Ray players are going to be a necessary thing if this format expects to survive. The sooner the better! Of course, one could always argue that there will be a $500 Blu-Ray player (PS3) available on November 17th as well... too bad you have to know somebody to get one.

Know someone OR if you're willing to camp out to get in line for all the special opening stores are to be having for them, provided you're in an area that actually has one.

I wonder if the Circuit City in Virginia is one of mine? Article says Wal-Mart will have midnight launch parties too.

http://www.homemediaretailing.com/ne...rticle_ID=9918

EDIT: Richmond, Va. Bit of a ways for me, but a D.C. Circuit City will have a launch party.

[Adam Gregorich]

Ron-
The second generation 1080P Toshiba player will be $999 (With HDMI 1.3). Their will be a 1080i HDMI 1.1 model for $499. Anything next year would be a 3rd gen player.

Dave-
Expect Denon to get into the fray next year. They may even show at CES (no promises). Word on the street at CEDIA was that they were waiting for the software sales number for the holiday season to decide if they are going HDDVD or BluRay.

[drbonbi]

I just finished watching "The Great Raid" on the Panny DMP-BD10 player connected to the Panny XR700 receiver by HDMI for video and multi-channel audio. Sensational.

Dana

[Dave Moritz]

Quote:

Dave-
Expect Denon to get into the fray next year. They may even show at CES (no promises). Word on the street at CEDIA was that they were waiting for the software sales number for the holiday season to decide if they are going HDDVD or BluRay.

All I have to hear is that Denon will have a player out and that may be enough to make me hold off on the Panasonic Bluray. We will see what happens till then as I will not have the money saved to buy the Bluray player until around March or April. I should at least have around 13 Bluray titles to enjoy the day the player is purchased.

So until I hear of a Denon Bluray player the Panasonic is on my wish list.

[GoldenRedux]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Grant H

Have fun, man! I don't think any of my equipment has ever let me set distance for the sub, but I've never paid top dollar. My SACD player was supposed to be good quality at the time though. Then again, it was Philips!

Every piece of equipment I ever purchased that did time alignment allowed me to set the distance of the sub. I even have a $199 Sony A/V receiver from 4 years ago that allows me to do that. This is why I found it very strange that the Panasonic wouldn't. What's even more odd is when running the channel level tests, the Panasonic does not output a test signal for the subwoofer, but does for every other speaker. This is very odd.

Quote:

I've been wondering about the treatment of 6.1 material. If you have a 7.1 speaker setup, do you adjust your receiver to say you only have one surround back input (as my manual seems to suggest) or does the receiver automatically send the same signal over both surround back outputs? I'm guessing the former.

I'm thinking this may be how it must be handled as well, but I'd have to check that.

On another note, contrary to what was previously discussed, the Panasonic does not allow one to turn off the video section during DVD-A or CD playback. The DVD-A playback setting is labeled misleadingly in that it says 'Video Off', but it means DVD Video mode off, as in, 'playback DVD-As as DVD-As not DVD-Vs'.

Anyway, enough audio talk. My first impressions of the video playback - . I've hooked the Panny up to my Samsung HLN437W 43" DLP via HDMI->DVI, and I'm at aprox. 8 feet away. I know from experience that component doesn't look good at all on this set, so I won't even bother with it. I've set the HDMI resolution to 'Automatic' which means it sets itself to 720p.

So far, I only have a few titles on hand - Eight Below (obviously ), Stealth, Good Night and Good Luck, The Corpse Bride, Rattle & Hum, Legends of Jazz Showcase with Jack Ramsey, and John Legend Live at the House of Blues.

First, I'd say that I believe I probably need to adjust the picture settings on the Panasonic to get the best out of it, but I have no way of calibrating it properly without any test patterns and such, so for now I've just left it as is.

I've only had the opportunity to watch Stealth straight through. I really did not like the movie at all and, in fact, fell asleep on it at one point, but the PQ looked pretty good to me. Keep in mind, however, that I have nothing to compare it to. It maybe at first seemed a little soft to me, but I didn't see any noticeable macro-blocking, not even in all the flames and explosions. Maybe the colours were a bit over-saturated, but, again, it could be that I need to adjust the picture on the Panasonic. Does anyone know of a Blu-ray disc with test patterns and such for aiding in this?

I watched 3/4 of Eight Below which looked exceptional to me - very film-like, IMO - and I also watched the first 20 minutes of The Corpse Bride which, as expected, looked beautiful.

I put in Legends of Jazz and watched a few of the performances as well. I t looked superb. This one is one I have a frame of reference for as I saw the entire series on my local PBS HD OTA station. In comparison to the Blu-ray release, the OTA broadcast looked like complete rubbish, as the local PBS HD that I can pull in OTA (WNET-DT Channel 13) broadcasts 2 substations and their main HD channel suffers from plenty of macro-blocking and other digital artifacts. I'd add also that this title has a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 program. I'm looking forward to trying it out when Panasonic finally issues that firmware update for Dobly TrueHD and DTS-HD decoding.

So far, I'm pretty impressed. I've only watched a little material, but everything so far has been the best HD material I've seen in my home - better than OTA, and certainly better than DirecTV HD.

Operation of the unit it relatively smooth. It's a little slow to start up and load discs, but I have a Samsung HD931 upscaling DVD player that is almost as slow as this Panasonic, so it's al relative. I haven't come across any glitches so far - no freezing or resetting; no audio dropouts or frame drops; so far so good. I won't bother to go into detail about the rubbish remote control - that has been discussed ad nauseam. Once I become familiar with the controls and operations of the unit, I will be programming the functions into my Sony RM-AX4000 'remote commander' anyway.

More to follow as more titles start rolling in here and I get more time with the unit....

[chuckamuck]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ben_Williams

$500 Blu-Ray players are going to be a necessary thing if this format expects to survive. The sooner the better! Of course, one could always argue that there will be a $500 Blu-Ray player (PS3) available on November 17th as well... too bad you have to know somebody to get one.

Either way, as of next Friday, there will be at the very least 200,000 Blu-ray players in American homes in the form of PS3, and that number will grow quickly through the holidays and beyond as the system becomes more readily available.

Even if only a quarter of those PS3 owners buy Blu-ray software for their machines, that will still be more than the current number of HD-DVD owners.

[Grant H]

I'm glad I snatched up Terminator and Terminator 2 on Blu-Ray when I saw them too cheap to pass up (around $13/ea, one at DDD, one at Amazon) a while back, even though I won't have a player for a while (not that it isn't tempting to line up at that DC Circuit City for a PS3, but, but I plan to get the best player for me as a heavy movie-watcher, light gamer, and based on what equipment I have to hook it up to).

At least Terminator 2 has the THX Optimizer on it, even if I'll likely end up buying a better version of the film down the line.

Back in the VCR days I was pretty good at setting things by eye and having them look quite good, though I tended to do a lot of tweaking over time. With calibration discs I only make very slight adjustments for about a week and I'm pleased. Gotta get those color and black levels juuusst right.

Even as a little kid I couldn't understand why the picture on other people's TVs looked so terrible. Like they never adjusted them or just had no clue what looked natural. I wonder how many people I annoyed by taking the liberty of adjusting them. Of course these are probably the same people who went on to buy poorly calibrated projection TVs or any big-screens with shoddy picture and didn't care. As long as it was big.

Back to the topic, great to hear about another user not encountering any glitches with this player. Good job, Panasonic! They must have had their game together long ago.