Panasonic DMP-BD10 Blu-ray Disc Player

The DMP-BD10 is Panasonic's first player for the controversial Blu-ray Disc high definition format. At a price of around £1300, this unit will set expectations high for many.

I should point out from the out-set that this review does take into account the fact that there are two competing high definition disc formats. I believe this is a terrible mistake on the part of Hollywood as well as the consumer electronics companies (who doesn't, asides from a few executives who are hoping to get rich?), but it's a mistake we're saddled with nevertheless. My point of view is that the few consumers who are willing to even look at HD video discs given the risk of obsoletion simply want "an HD disc player", rather than one belonging to a specific format. As such, I'll be taking this into account but on the whole will be reviewing the DMP-BD10 player rather than the entire format itself.

Reviewing the DMP-BD10 is fairly challenging, for several reasons. Most notably, it's a player for a relatively new format, so material can be scarce. This situation is worsened due to the Blu-ray Disc Association's requirement for region locking, and as such, the player will only play back Region B Blu-ray Discs (those from Europe, Africa, Australia and New Zealand) as well as titles from abroad that do not feature a region lockout. Similarly, the review unit was delivered with a standard definition DVD region locking system in place, although the unit can easily be purchased from online retailers, without this designed-in flaw.

The player itself is well-constructed and features a reflective plastic flap on the front, which I thought was a nice feature as well as one that wasn't distracting. It's a classy kind of muted grey reflective surface, not the over-used gloss black that's found its way onto so many devices lately. The flap opens to allow the insertion of a disc, as well as access to Play, Pause, Stop, Seek, and Open/Close buttons. It's not motorised, so relies on the drive door pushing it down to open it (not recommended), and your hand to close it again. Under the hood, the player features a Panasonic SW-5582-C Blu-ray disc drive, which delivers video to a Sigma Designs SMP8634LF A/V chip.

What's very interesting indeed is that Panasonic's Industrial products site reveals that the contained SW-5582-C drive is actually a Blu-ray writer! Although Panasonic's accountants will of course know better than me and obviously won't be throwing money away, I'm certain that this can't be cost-effective. Naturally, it's limited by the rest of the hardware in the unit so will only play discs, but I found this very interesting all the same.

Note: the DMP-BD10 was delivered with v1.0 of the firmware installed. It was upgraded to v1.4 prior to review. Read on to find out how it performs.

Remote Control

I've always been a fan of Panasonic's remote controls. Typically, they're well laid-out and fit nicely in your hand. The DMP-BD10's remote is the first of Panasonic's that I've used since their DVD-S97 upscaling player from several years back, so I was a little disappointed to find out that the design of the remote has been radically altered since. The DMP-BD10's remote control is chunky and hides several of its less important functions (like Sharpness/Colour adjustments) under a flap, which can actually be difficult to lift. During the review process, I actually managed to break the flap off twice (fortunately, it was easy enough to re-attach). The fact that I like to access the Setup menu and tweak the picture a lot means that I'd have preferred it if Panasonic had instead hidden less important functions than these under the flap.


In addition, the remote control uses a directional pad that doubles up as a jog wheel. This can mean that heavy presses are required to enter Up, Down, Left or Right directional commands. In particular, I had a hard time using the "Down" directional function.

On the plus side, the remote control does have the most necessary functions – such as Stop, Pause and Play, as well as the controls for the Blu-ray menu systems – accessible at all times. Also, the remote has buttons to control some functions of your TV, as well as Panasonic receivers.

Tweaks/Setup

I connected the player via HDMI and upon firing it up, I was greeted with a "Quick Setup" menu after a brief delay. Things were easy to configure, and I selected 1080p video output to send 1920x1080 video to our HDTV, which displayed the picture 1:1 mapped with close to no alterations to display an extremely accurate rendering of the player's output.


Although the upscaling of standard def discs on this player is good (more on this later), with upscaling players, I usually prefer to adjust the output resolution on a per-disc basis, because I find that some discs benefit from the process more than others (although this can be entirely subjective). It's a shame, then, that there's no option in the DMP-BD10's menu to output standard def DVDs in their native 480-line/576-line (for NTSC/PAL respectively) formats, and to output 1080p Blu-ray discs in 1080p automatically. Setting the player to output 480p/576p will also down-scale 1080p Blu-ray discs to this resolution, which is obviously a situation you'd want to avoid. Changing the output resolution requires you to stop disc playback and delve into the Setup menu, then resume disc playback.

The player also lets you fine-tune the following aspects of the picture, which is very useful for getting optimum results with a wide variety of displays:


All of the options are relatively self-explanatory, except for the bottom two Noise Reduction options. "3D-NR" is Temporal Noise Reduction which analyses frames as a sequence and attempts to freeze rapidly moving patterns. The results of this feature can only be seen when the picture is moving. "Integrated DNR", on the other hand, is Spatial Noise Reduction which works on single frames and clips certain frequencies, giving the picture an "eroded" look which removes fine details. Both of these options, as always, should be left off.

One thing that might sound strange that I appreciated whilst navigating the player's menus, was that the DMP-BD10 actually felt like a video disc player. The first-gen Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD player's slower start-up times and less intuitive interface were more of a mental stumbling block than a genuine usability one, but Panasonic's Blu-ray player operates much like a DVD player.

With everything correctly set up, let's begin the picture quality analysis.

In-depth Quality Analysis: Blu-ray Discs

Blu-ray Film: 1080p/24

Panasonic were kind enough to provide us with some Blu-ray Discs for review with the player, which was most appreciated because our own discs were still in transit from the USA (and not all of these would be playable on this player due to the BD system's region locking). The first of these was simply called "Blu-ray Demo Disc", and was produced by Twentieth Century Fox to show off some of their movies. I've actually seen this disc playing in a store several times before, so I was curious to see it on my own set-up.

Whilst playing the disc with the player outputting 1080p video to the TV, we noticed some very, very minor aliasing on fine lines. The Fox disc contains a trailer for "Walk The Line" which features text slowly moving into view, and we noticed a very slight flicker on both the text and also the 20th Century Fox studio logo as it rotated. This is probably explained by the fact that current 1080p players do not actually keep the video signal as 1080p all the way through the chain. The set-up here reportedly reads the video from the disc as a 1080i signal, which a separate chip then has to convert BACK to 1080p, allowing a miniscule error like this to slip in during the process. Nevertheless, having the player output 1080p video using this method was definitely superior to sending a 1080i signal to our HDTV (a Sony KDL-40W2000) to deinterlace itself.

We confirmed this minor problem by bringing up the hidden test pattern from one of Sony's Blu-ray Discs (in this case, "Silent Hill"). The finest points of the resolution test pattern moved and twittered very gently on the DMP-BD10, whereas on the Playstation 3 - which keeps the signal purely as 1080p throughout - all of the details were static.


Fox's demo disc does have some great looking moments (the "Walk The Line" trailer specifically), but overall, we thought they could have chosen some better demo material because the disc lacks a "Wow" factor. The image wasn't standard-def quality, but it's not the first thing you'd want to try and impress anyone with after spending a lot of cash on an HD setup, either. Some of the scenes showed visible compression artefacts, which was down to the disc using the dated MPEG-2 codec (as do several Blu-ray titles, sadly). Nevertheless, this is not the fault of Panasonic's player and is related to the content available to play on it.


The second provided disc was "Fantastic 4", again from Fox, with a similarly unimpressive video transfer featuring Temporal Noise Reduction artefacts and a lack of fine detail. I did not feel it was fair to fully evaluate the player using such a sub-standard disc, but once again, none of the other films would play due to Blu-ray's regional lock-out system. (Who does this lockout system benefit, exactly?) It did, however, reveal that the DMP-BD10 suffers from the Chroma Upsampling Error whilst playing Blu-ray Discs, which means that areas of colour will have a slightly jagged edge to them. In HD, it's much harder to spot than it was in the Standard Def days (true of almost any defect), but it's there and I hope that Panasonic can correct this with a firmware upgrade.

Fortunately, before "going to press", we did manage to find a region-free Blu-ray film with an excellent transfer: the American Silent Hill disc from Sony. Barring a few compression artefacts (the result of MPEG-2 once again), the quality was exceptionally good indeed and other than the aforementioned twittering that results from the 1080i->1080p conversion, we were very happy with the results, proving that when fed the right disc, the DMP-BD10 is capable of excellent HD pictures.

Blu-ray Video: 1080i/60

The most impressive disc that Panasonic supplied to use with the player was actually one they'd produced themselves. This very short disc was encoded in the MPEG-4 AVC codec (the others were using the dated and more artefact-prone MPEG-2) and contained three short clips featuring recording artists. The only artefacts present here were a result of the cameras used to record the clips (the first showed colour abnormalities but was nevertheless impressive), and the second clip – Katherine Jenkins singing "Everything I Do" - begins inside a concert hall, revealing some truly brilliant details in the sculptures around the stage. This finally delivered the "Wow" that we were expecting. It's a damn shame that this footage probably won't ever be made available to the average consumer, because it's really impressive.


The DMP-BD10 was set up to send 1080p video to our 1080p native HDTV. As the material on this disc is 1080i/60, the player was performing the interlaced-to-progressive conversion. As you'd expect, there were some occasional jaggy patterns left over (it's literally impossible to do deinterlacing of video content without compromise), but the results were very good overall and were superior to sending the original 1080i to our HDTV and having it do the conversion to 1080p itself.

In-depth Quality Analysis: Standard Definition DVD upscaled to 1080p

Before testing individual types of SD DVD, I first confirmed that the player was passing both "Whiter than White" and "Blacker than Black" shades using both PAL and NTSC versions of the THX Optimiser (as any flaws here typically affect all types of SD disc). The DMP-BD10 had absolutely no problems here, which means that no detail in intensely bright nor intensely dark areas is being lost. I did, however, have to set the player's Brightness setting to "+1" to ensure that Blacker than Black was being passed.

Video playback: NTSC Films with Progressive Flag

The NTSC version of Disney's "Pocahontas" is one of many examples of an all-digital transfer of an animated film (one that's never touched film but has come directly from the computer-coloured drawings) which causes a large amount of macro-blocking to become visible on some cheaper upscaling players. A lot of this film uses incredibly strong blue colours, which can produce differing results between players, due to the fact that DVD makes use of 4:2:0 compressed colours (that is, half-resolution colours are layered on top of a full-resolution standard-def image). The DMP-BD10 produced a vertically stair-stepped pattern around strong colours, whereas the much cheaper Panasonic DVD-S97 seemed to conceal this artefact by using chroma filtering of some sort. It's debatable which one of these methods is preferable, because the chroma filtering on the cheaper player sometimes obscured some details which appeared, albeit jaggily, on the DMP-BD10.

However, one player I also tested played the same disc with neither of these problems. That player, ironically, was the Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD player. Have a look at yourself at how all three players handled this same, tricky area of colour:


The same results were visible on PAL disc playback (although not on the Toshiba HD-A1, because it's an American player and doesn't play PAL discs at all!), which means that the DMP-BD10 is close to perfect for the playback of standard definition material. Those who rarely watch animation will probably not be the slightest bothered with the way in which it handles colour, however.

I next inserted my favourite almost-but-not-quite-perfect NTSC film transfer, the Criterion Collection version of "The Rock". Yes, I know I use this shot in every single hardware review, but there's a reason for that! Just look at the results:

Video playback: NTSC Films without Progressive Flag

The DMP-BD10 plays the less common "hard telecined" discs – that is, discs that do not have the Progressive Flags that aid the deinterlacing process embedded into the video stream – without any problems at all. There's nothing more to say other than that there's no jaggy motion or loss of detail on these rare titles.

I next tested an animated disc that has a truly excellent transfer - "Ren and Stimpy: The Lost Episodes!" - which was animated at the 24fps Film frame rate, and for the most part is encoded on DVD with a 3-2 pulldown pattern. Upon inserting this disc, I did notice that the Chroma Upsampling Error was once again present. However, the rest of the image quality is so excellent that it was easy for me to overlook it.

Video playback: PAL Film

The first PAL film I popped into the DMP-BD10 was the Australian version of Disney's "Mulan". This 2D animated film not only has a very good (but not perfect) DVD transfer, but as an all-digital transfer it's extremely useful for sniffing out macro-blocking enhancement problems that certain cheaper upscaling players tend to suffer from. (Transfers of animated films taken from film rather than a digital source benefit from having film grain on cheaper players, which actually masks macro-blocking problems).

The disc has some light edge enhancement of its own, and this is where I really appreciated the DMP-BD10's ability to actually slightly soften the picture to try and conceal the disc's flaw. I was completely floored at just how effective this function was. Not many people would consider actually lowering the sharpness, but the DMP-BD10 allows you to fine-tune this adjustment to compensate for edge enhancement without removing fine detail:


Similarly, the appearance of this 2D animated film means that it's also useful for detecting instances of the Chroma Upsampling Error. As with the NTSC playback, the DMP-BD10's PAL film playback does in fact feature the error, although as usual, it's hard to detect on anything but animated content. Hopefully Panasonic can correct this with a firmware upgrade in the future.

Although animated content is great for evaluating most areas of playback quality, I tested some PAL live action films as well, just to be sure. The first title I used was the French edition of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". (The UK release apparently has an identically high quality video transfer, but as this film is censored in the UK, I don't own that version of it). Again, a picture that appeared to be completely trouble free and as good as it could possibly be given the limitations of the disc itself (of which there aren't many).

Similarly, the PAL SuperBit DVD of "Hannibal", although featuring some horizontal ringing, does have a superb level of detail, which the DMP-BD10 displayed brilliantly. The top-down shot of the courtyard in Venice where the Italian inspector is standing amongst the pigeons proves exactly what can be done with a Standard definition disc when it's competently mastered and played on a high quality player like this one.

I did also note that a minute Y/C Delay issue (colours shifted very slightly out of the lines) is present whilst upscaling both NTSC and PAL DVDs. I need to stress "slight" though and I never noticed it during a live action film, except on some DVD menus. I did, however, notice the same problem on the output of the on-screen displays, which seems to confirm that it's player-wide.

Unsurprisingly for a player in this price range, it detected the 2-2 Pulldown pattern properly, so PAL movie playback was jaggy free. The end result of all of this is that the unit can display potentially very impressive DVD pictures, but a few problems are here that I'd rather weren't, given the price.

Video playback: NTSC/PAL Video Camera (60i/50i)

Video deinterlacing is incredibly tricky and always involves some degree of compromise, as unlike Film playback where clear pictures can be obtained by re-ordering fields, Video content means that the hardware has to fill in information that simply isn't there. The DMP-BD10 fares as well as could be expected, and like all other in-player deinterlacing solutions I've seen, occasionally revealed combing artefacts upon fast motion. The same results held true of both NTSC and PAL video.

Usability and Responsiveness

Powering on the player with an SD DVD in the drive took 29 seconds from the first button press to an image appearing on screen. The results for Blu-ray Disc playback were slightly longer, with the player taking 45 seconds to display the initial Copyright Warning screen. These times, although slow compared to most SD DVD players, are fairly typical of first-generation high-def disc players. (Oddly, powering the unit off actually brings up a "Please Wait" message as well.)

The remote control responds almost instantly to simple Play/Pause/Stop commands. Navigating the setup menus is a little slower, but only slightly. Finally, support for the BD-Java interactive menu system that Blu-ray uses, is a little on the sluggish side also.

Sound

Although Fox's "Fantastic 4" disc disappointed us greatly on the video front, it did not handicap the DMP-BD10's fantastic audio potential. The disc features an astonishingly good soundtrack encoded using DTS HD 5.1 Master Audio, and seriously impressed us when connected to a 5.1 setup, despite only accessing the backwards-compatibility "legacy" portion of the track (as equipment that can take full advantage of the next-gen audio codecs is not available).

During playback, the DMP-BD10 offers several audio adjustments, all of which we left off. These include "VSS" (Virtual Surround Sound), which can process Dolby Digital audio for a simulated surround sound effect on Stereo speakers. Similarly, "Dialogue Enhancer" simply raises the volume of the centre audio channel, and the "Re-master" and "Digital Filter" options affect the audio in ways that don't seem to produce radically altered results.

Conclusion

The DMP-BD10 is an impressive unit. Its standard definition DVD upscaling is very good, but is tainted slightly by the presence of undesirable Chroma errors. Even still, it has made going back to my far cheaper upscaling Faroudja-based player VERY difficult, which is testament to the quality of the pictures it can deliver from SD DVDs.

The quality of Blu-ray Discs is, in these early days, harder to evaluate, but like the HD DVD playback from Toshiba's HD-A1, this player suffers from the Chroma Upsampling Error. This is a fairly disappointing misfeature given the player's four-figure price tag and again, I hope that Panasonic can correct it.

For those wanting to get into High-Def video discs, a Toshiba HD DVD player - which will play HD DVDs from anywhere in the world - can be had for considerably less, as can an imported Playstation 3 for those determined to go down the Blu-ray route (although remember that the latter of these has no DVD upscaling functionality at all). Both of these options deliver considerably more "bang per buck", and the Playstation 3 in particular is very responsive and slick indeed (look for a review here soon). Similarly, as Blu-ray is region locked, I would be very reluctant to buy a player that can only play Region B discs, which are more likely to be censored than their American counterparts, and are typically released later, and with higher prices.

Given that the future of one of these formats is potentially up in the air (assuming that the two don't eventually co-exist), £1300 is a lot of money to spend. If your heart is truly in the Blu-ray camp and you can accept the DMP-BD10's price tag (or get a really good deal), and want a high quality DVD upscaler, then there's a lot to like about it despite its imperfections.