Official Panasonic DMP-BD10 Blu-Ray player thread (1 Viewer)

[Paul.S]

Neil:

Was it particular SD DVD titles that you were experiencing problems with? If so, which?

 

[Rachael B]

The Sony may well serve me better in the future after a series of firmware upgrades? I suspect so. It has HDMI issues with some discs....a collum of displaced pixels about an inch wide, about an inch from the left side of the screen. Other folks at AVS have had the same thing. Stopping and restarting the film can make it go away....or switching to component in my case.

The player also has issues with the latest Fox discs. If you go to the audio menu, portions of the menu remain in the film as pair of rectangular, black blocks. I had to stop the disc, reload it, and start without menu grazing. BTW, it was F4 SS. It's also very slow to load a few discs lately. F4 SS, Delta Farce, and a few others.

If I'd just paid $100 more for another Panasonic, I'd have no or few playback issues. I wish I'd done that. I may eventually get True HD with a Sony upgrade? The Panny codes the True into PCM and does it well. I sort'a doubt either playeris gonna ever pass DTS Master but it's possible for the Sony via a future upgrade. I think it's established that the Panny isn't gonna pass Master.

The Panny has been heads above my Samsung 1000 and the Sony in regards to smooth, reliable operation. On maybe the second and third firmwares I had a few minor navigation issues, like freezing up and powering down. Never, never an issue with the newer firmwares. None! Then I never slipped in that LOTR's DVD that the latest firmware is supposed to cure....I have it.

All-round, the Panny has been the smooth, reliable deck for me. It's kind'a clunky looking and the door is dumb but it performs very well. The remote is silver and the deck is black, I bet the remote matches the Japanese model? Anybody know??? I wish I had two of 'em! Saving $100 on the Sony doesn't seem worth it right now that it seems evident I'm gonna have to haggle with a series of firmware upgrades to get the Sony close to or as good as the Panny is now.

 

[drbonbi]

If one can find a leftover BD10 that's cheaper than the BD10A, buy it. It is the same player.

Dana

 

[Paul.S]

Thanks much for your comments, Rachael.

Dana, again, FWIW, it's my understanding that the 10 uses a BD burner and the 10A uses a BD-ROM drive. And the list price of the 10A is more than half off that of the 10. I'd be surprised, even this long after the 10's release, to find it for less than the 10A anywhere except perhaps on a 'open box' basis.

 

[Adam Barratt]

I believe that both the 10 and 10A use Panasonic's SW-5582-C 2X BD-R/RE/ROM writer (with all write functionality and BD-R/RE support partially disabled).

Adam

 

[ErichH]

Yes - Worked quite well for me. I think the opinions here are trustworthy.

 

[zuddal]

Official Panasonic DMP-BD10 Blu-Ray player thread

 

[Rachael B]

Anybody else thinkin' about gettin' the new Panasonic player? I preordered one from Vann's. It's gonna feed the Onkyo 805 I've installed as of late as a pre the True toast and Master pudding. After my experience with the A10, my trust is in Panasonic. I figur I'll proably get the deck in the next 2 weeks...???

 

[Adam Gregorich]

I have the A10 and will sit this round out--would have been tempted if it had ethernet. With the Onkyo you can decode just about everthing via bitstream. Video quality is improved a bit and the 1080P/24 ouptut is nice if your display can support it. When you get it can you let me know if it comes with a 256MB SD card? If it doesn't you may need to order one to take advantage of some of the 1.1 features. There are come audio quirks when using in PIP (no lossless audio or high bit rate audio), but other than that it looks like a nice machine.

 

[Adam Sanchez]

I admit I did not read through all this thread but I'm deciding on a BD player and I think I'm just about set on this one. I just wanted to ask if it still includes the 5 free movies IN THE BOX or was that a temporary thing? I'm hoping not. I believe I also read you get to mail in for 5 more? (But I can't find a link to that form.)

 

[drbonbi]

Both deals seem to still be current as reported in recent posts here http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...0#post12147420 The post has the link to the form!

Dana

 

[Rachael B]

I'm just getting it for the audio bitstreaming ability. After last night's fun with the new A35 passing True & Master, T & M....sounds kind'a like somethin' kinky...? Now, I'm really itchin' to hear my T & M BD's. I stille have 1080i sets, presently I have no need for advanced video features.

I think I read somewhere that the 30 would be available about 6 November. I might get a shipping notice soon...?

 

[Adam Gregorich]

Panasonci told us the 12th. I wonder if that means they start shipping to retailers on the 6th?

 

[Adam Sanchez]

I don't know if this is the right thread to ask this in, but I didn't know where else to.

I recently got the Panny BD10A, my first BD player and loving it.

Does anyone know if the mail in for 5 free movies will work with this player? The closest player listed on the form is the BD10AK. Is that and the 10A the same model, or will they not honor my 5 freebies?

Hate to cut my UPC off for nothing...can't find any answer on this around.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

It works. The 'K' is just the color designation (the silver mode is the 10AS). Just check off the BD10A

 

[GregoryP]

I have the DMP-BD10A player and am having an intermittent problem with the analog audio outputs. Sometimes the rear speakers don't get any audio at all. When I use a 5.1 test tone through the Ratatoulle BD or the Video Essentials DVD, the rear channel audio is re-directed to the front speakers. When I use the player test tones, the rear speakers work fine, though. This is an intermittent problem, because sometimes I can power off the player and power it back on again and the rear audio will work fine. Other times I cannot fix the problem this way. The audio format doesn't seem to matter. I've switched between PCM, Dolby True HD, DTS 5.1, and Dolby Digital 5.1 and when the rear audio is failing, they all fail.

Today I'm calling Panasonic tech support to see what they recommend, and naturally everything is working perfectly right now.

I have the player hooked up to the 5.1 analog inputs on my receiver. I don't think this can possibly be a problem with the receiver, because when BD's fail, the player test tones still work fine.

In the player speaker setup menu, I have the surround back speakers turned off. All of the other speakers are set to small.

Does anybody have any thoughts? I've upgraded to the latest firmware.

 

[GregoryP]

Good News! I think I figured out the problem!

My TV uses a component video input, but I also sometimes hook up a front projector that uses HDMI video input. When I'd hook up the projector, the Panasonic Blu-Ray player was sending the audio via HDMI too. I guess when this happens, the analog audio outputs act funny.

I went into the HDMI settings and turned off HDMI audio and everything seems to be working now!

WOO HOO!

 

[Patrick Sun]

I had the same issue, except I'm using a cheap component A/V switcher box for the 5.1 audio output from the Panasonic BD10A and the Toshiba XA2, but the video was being sent directly to my plasma's 2 HDMI inputs (one for the BD10A and the other for the XA2).

Since I had to manually switch the audio to hear either the BD10A or XA2, I noticed that when the 5.1 switcher box was set for the BD10A output, and the BD10A's video was the active HDMI source on my TV, the audio output was just 2-channel audio.

But, if I left the 5.1 switcher box set for the BD10A, but changed the HDMI source to the XA2, the audio was still coming from the BD10A, but I was getting 5.1-audio from the BD10A, but only when the HDMI link was non-active. After breaking down and RTFM-ing, I figured out that I needed to disable the audio output of HDMI on the BD10A. Once I did that, I was getting the normal video from the BD10A HDMI output to the plasma, and the 5.1 audio was outputted corrected through the analog outputs on the BD10A as well.

 

[Elphaba]

I have a question, or really an issue with playback quality.

My gear:

Blu-Ray: DMP-BD10AK
X-Box 360
Reciever: Yamaha VS-X661
TV: Philips 47PFL7432*

The Blu-Ray player and X-Box are hooked into the reciever's two HDMI inputs, and it's hooked to the TV's HDMI input.

Any and every BD I've played looks very good to excellent. Pixar SD movies played on the 10A also look very nice, appearing very close in quality to their HD counterparts. Traditional animation, particularly Timmverse DCU cartoons also look fine.

However, SD discs played back on the 10AK do have a problem. Fleshtones seam smeared, a little flat, as if the color were being evened out, and when a person moves, they leave little flesh-colored smears of color trailing behind. This is particularly noticeable against dark backgrounds, as with The Matrix and Deep Blue Sea, two movies where it looks terrible. It likewise is very noticeable in dramas and romantic comedies, which tend to have a lot of closeups of people's faces. It's annoying, but tolerable. I assumed it was either a product of the upscaling done by the player or the TV. Changing the output resolution on the player had no effect. 1080p, 1080i, 720p, and 480p (which would allow the TV to do the scaling) signals all looked the same.

Then I remembered that the X-Box is also a SD DVD player. So I popped the same troublesome discs into it and voila, I have my varied, more detailed skin tones back. No flat tones, no smearing, no color trails. Terms of Endearment looked horrid on the BD, fine for a twenty year old drama on the X-Box. The X-Box is set to output everything at 1080p.

I downloaded a 480p movie to the X-Box's hard drive, and tried it. It also looked fine.

So I'm a bit confused. Obviously the simple answer is to just play SD DVDs using the XBox, but I'd like to know what, if any, I can do with the DMP to fix this problem. It doesn't appear to be the TV; if it were, I'd expect the same problem to show up when playing back on the X-Box.

I'd like to think it couldn't be that my video game system upscales better than my much more expensive dedicated BD player. Is it possible there is some setting on the BD10A that might be set wrong that I could change to fix this? Or am I just stuck watching SD DVDs on the XBox?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

*I originally got the 42" version, but it had screen uniformity problems, so I returned it. After having it a few days, I realized the larger set would work in my room, especially given how close you can sit when displaying HD material, so I upgraded the size.

 

[drbonbi]

I felt right from the get-go that since HDMI 1.3 permits players to off-load content in bit form to receivers for decoding, it would lead manufacturers to cheapen HD players so as to "encourage" the sale of decoding AVRs. One advantage of the BD10/BD10a models is that most codecs are decoded by the player itself and are compatible with many existing AVRs that don't have HDMI 1.3.

Now there's a published report here http://www.tvpredictions.com/whip that confirms my feelings.


Those of us that took the plunge on the BD10/BD10A can relax. Newer is not better.

Dana