Panasonic BMD BD30k Blu Ray DVD Player Review

Make / Model: Panasonic BMD BD30k Low Price Vendors: TigerDirect.com

Strengths: Fastest start-up & disc load times of present freestanding Blu-ray players. Excellent Hi-Def picture quality.

Weaknesses: Remote is confusing to use. Picture with factory settings is too dark. No "time remaining" display.

Summary: I first bought a Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player, but was immediately appalled by the terribly slow startup and disc load times. I quickly replaced it with the Panasonic DMP-BD30K player whose startup and disc load times are much more in line with those of standard DVD players.

The video & sound quality of this unit is excellent. It supports all the latest specs such as HDMI 1.3, 1080P, 24frames/sec, TrueHD audio and Dolby Digital HD-Master Audio via bitstream, and is able to have its firmware updated as enhancements are created. It also does a great job of playing & upscaling standard DVDs. I used to use my Oppo OPDV971H player for this, but find the Panasonic DMP-BD30K player does just as good a job. (I am viewing the picture on a 52" DLP HDTV.)

This unit can also display JPEG images from CD-R/RW, BD-RE & DVD-RAM discs or from an optional flash card plugged into the SD memory card slot on the face of the unit. On the negative side. I am having trouble getting accustom to the remote control layout, and find myself having to refer to the user manual in order to find some lower level functions. Also, out of the box, I felt that the image in darker portions of video were too dark, and detail was lost. I corrected this by going into the video setting menu while playing a Blu-ray disc (Display button, then down or up arrow button to select Video).

Then right arrow to the Picture setting selecting "User" from the available options. Then to Picture Adjustment changing the Gamma value to a +5, leaving all the other settings at their default 0 value. This has greatly improved the detail in dark scenes. Another annoying item is that this player will show the amount of time the DVD has played and the DVD's total time, but does not display the amount of remaining time. Interestingly, the Sony Blu-ray player that I replaced with this Panasonic unit also did not display amount of remaining time.

This is a rather small point since the user can simply do the math, but all the previous standard DVD players I have owned, including those that cost a lot less than these Blu-ray players, did the calculations for for you so that it was a quick button push to learn how much time was left in a video. All in all, I highly recommend the Panasonic DMP-BD30K Blu-ray player. It is definitely ahead of the present competition in features and quality.