Quote:
Originally Posted by Vonbek777 /forum/post/18517394
Is the 350 available yet? I ordered one yesterday, and was informed it will be a few weeks yet before they are available. Not much info out there on the unit yet, and I am trying to decide if I want to keep my pre-order. Currently have a Pioneer BDP-05fd...but really liked the new wireless features of the 350, if they work as advertised. Any lucky owners out there have any feedback on the unit?
Got my 300 today... Magnolia/BB also got 350's in yesterday.
First impressions... really nice player. Pretty quick to start up, and if you turn on Quick Start, it's on par with the PS3 from off to on in this mode...
Testing with Avatar, it loaded it about as fast as my PS3 Slim, which surprised me... I'll need to test some other discs.
I'll have to do some function timings later...
BD picture is as good as I've seen on any player (haven't tried SD DVD yet..) Some video processing tweak-ability in the menus as is typical for Panasonics.
It is a little noisy when spinning the discs up, but with any other audio in the room, it goes away..
One thing I noticed is that there was a little lag of audio when starting Avatar.. the first second of audio isn't coming across bitstream (and my receiver is lightning fast in picking up codecs..) And chapter skips are a little "laggy.." about one seconds, with audio following right behind... nothing earth shattering, but not as quick as a PS3 or Oppo...
The audio "hole" is also an issue when changing chapters or starting a title.... there is a 1-2 second silence before it sends out a decodable bitstream... PCM is fine.. I'll have to see if this is the same on the sub output.
One really cool thing, and I haven't seen this in other other standalone BR player (except the PS3) is a Playback Information Window (press Display>Play>PB Info Window..) This brings up an overlay at the top of the screen that shows Frame Rate, Video Codec, video bitrate, Audio Codec, channel count and audio bitrate (for example on Avatar, it says "1080/24p/MPEG4-AVC, 22.xxx MBPS; DTS-HD MSTR, 5.1ch, 3.xx MBPS).. the second line shows you the output you have selected for audio (i.e. bitstream) and if secondary audio is on or off... the third and fourth lines tell you what is going out of
each HDMI output (1080/24p, YCbCr 4:4:4, DTS-HD MSTR...)
Nice to have the information there is you want it...
The Viera Cast functions are fairly smooth... Youtube and Netflix are fairly quick and the browsing is fairly smooth.
It takes around 8 seconds to load into the Viera menu... jumping into Netflix from there is about 7 seconds... as good as I've seen. HD picture quality is really, really good. Navigating through the films is the fastest I've seen yet (compared to XBox 360, PS3 and LG BD 390..)
More to come....