All things 110/210/310 here! Who has received theirs so far? What do you like? What could they improve? gogogo!
edit: my first impressions after a 30 minute test session:
Im a total noob when it comes to this 3d stuff and blu-ray players and whatnot, so take all of this with a grain of salt. I just got the BDT110 today, upgrading from a BDT100 that I only played with a couple times before selling it on ebay. The 100 was my first blu-ray, and this is my first experience with plasma technology and 3d technology. I got the Panasonic 50GT25 3d plasma just a couple weeks ago. This is just going to be a stream of consciousness of things I noticed in my quick 30 minute test drive...
Setup and updating the firmware was simple through my ethernet connection. I read a review on amazon where the dude said he wasn't able to do it over the internet and had to burn some iso disc to update his firmware and it was a big pain, but I had no such issues.
Right off the bat I started having quite a lot of handshake issues w/ my Onkyo receiver when switching back and forth between 2d and 2d-->3d conversion. When I'd switch, it would get a static screen, then a green screen, then it would go blank. Then, I'd hear only audio with a blank picture. "HDMI handshake" problems is the correct term for this, right? I'd have to restart everything and it kept happening--it was quite frustrating. I think there are firmware updates to fix this, correct? I don't think this ever happened with my BDT100. Any suggestions?
As far as the 2d-->3d conversion, it seems to do a better job converting a blu-ray than my 50GT25 does, so that's pretty neat. I tried it on Toy Story 3 blu-ray and it looked pretty cool. Not as good as a true 3d blu-ray naturally, but pretty neat nonetheless. I tried doing 2d-3d from Netflix content by pushing the "3d" button, but it nothing happened (or did it say "this feature not available"?). So I'm not sure if you can convert that content to 3d.
Another thing that may turn out cool is that you can put a vignette around the picture in 3d. Have you ever noticed how the edges on a 3d blu-ray can sometimes look real distracting how one eye will have the image off of the screen and the other eye the edge of the image will be on the screen? I'm sure there's a name for this but all i know is that it can really take away from the movie at times. Anyway, the 110 has an upgrade (from the 100) where you can put a black/gray/blue/red vignette around the edges so that edge artifact is nearly gone.
I'll have to play with the settings to get everything looking optimal, as there are so many damn things you can tweak (i.e., depth, .
The interface is really slick looking and seems intuitive. The Netflix upgrade from the 100 is great. You can now browse all titles, rather than just look at your instant queue and their suggestions. One thing that seems to be missing is that you can't browse just by HD content.
I tried burning an .mkv file of a blu-ray movie to a DVD-R and playing it, and although the resolution of the picture itself looked stellar, no audio was coming through and the video was really choppy, speeding up then slowing down. This is the first time I have ever burned any mkv files so it is distinctly possible that I did something wrong and this is of no fault of the player itself. Just throwing this out there...
A minor thing that kept pissing me off... When I'd put a movie in, I tried to press the "top menu" button to skip the previews and go right to the title menu of the movie, but it never seemed to work? I had to manually fast forward through previews and whatnot. I'm sure this is something I was doing wrong probably.
I'll update as I think of more things.
edit: my first impressions after a 30 minute test session:
Im a total noob when it comes to this 3d stuff and blu-ray players and whatnot, so take all of this with a grain of salt. I just got the BDT110 today, upgrading from a BDT100 that I only played with a couple times before selling it on ebay. The 100 was my first blu-ray, and this is my first experience with plasma technology and 3d technology. I got the Panasonic 50GT25 3d plasma just a couple weeks ago. This is just going to be a stream of consciousness of things I noticed in my quick 30 minute test drive...
Setup and updating the firmware was simple through my ethernet connection. I read a review on amazon where the dude said he wasn't able to do it over the internet and had to burn some iso disc to update his firmware and it was a big pain, but I had no such issues.
Right off the bat I started having quite a lot of handshake issues w/ my Onkyo receiver when switching back and forth between 2d and 2d-->3d conversion. When I'd switch, it would get a static screen, then a green screen, then it would go blank. Then, I'd hear only audio with a blank picture. "HDMI handshake" problems is the correct term for this, right? I'd have to restart everything and it kept happening--it was quite frustrating. I think there are firmware updates to fix this, correct? I don't think this ever happened with my BDT100. Any suggestions?
As far as the 2d-->3d conversion, it seems to do a better job converting a blu-ray than my 50GT25 does, so that's pretty neat. I tried it on Toy Story 3 blu-ray and it looked pretty cool. Not as good as a true 3d blu-ray naturally, but pretty neat nonetheless. I tried doing 2d-3d from Netflix content by pushing the "3d" button, but it nothing happened (or did it say "this feature not available"?). So I'm not sure if you can convert that content to 3d.
Another thing that may turn out cool is that you can put a vignette around the picture in 3d. Have you ever noticed how the edges on a 3d blu-ray can sometimes look real distracting how one eye will have the image off of the screen and the other eye the edge of the image will be on the screen? I'm sure there's a name for this but all i know is that it can really take away from the movie at times. Anyway, the 110 has an upgrade (from the 100) where you can put a black/gray/blue/red vignette around the edges so that edge artifact is nearly gone.
I'll have to play with the settings to get everything looking optimal, as there are so many damn things you can tweak (i.e., depth, .
The interface is really slick looking and seems intuitive. The Netflix upgrade from the 100 is great. You can now browse all titles, rather than just look at your instant queue and their suggestions. One thing that seems to be missing is that you can't browse just by HD content.
I tried burning an .mkv file of a blu-ray movie to a DVD-R and playing it, and although the resolution of the picture itself looked stellar, no audio was coming through and the video was really choppy, speeding up then slowing down. This is the first time I have ever burned any mkv files so it is distinctly possible that I did something wrong and this is of no fault of the player itself. Just throwing this out there...
A minor thing that kept pissing me off... When I'd put a movie in, I tried to press the "top menu" button to skip the previews and go right to the title menu of the movie, but it never seemed to work? I had to manually fast forward through previews and whatnot. I'm sure this is something I was doing wrong probably.
I'll update as I think of more things.