Panasonic DMP BDT500 - Page 15

Here's a silly question, can this player resume a blu-ray disc from where you left off (if you turned the player off)? I tried on a LOTR disc and the panny didn't, just wondering if it's the unit or the disc.

Thanks!

Yes, If the disc has that feature. Read the last two pages. For example, Batman Begins does not for all players.

How about some screen caps showing the differences in pic. quality between brands of players.

How did you get bookmarks working. I've inserted a 1GB card but it's not working (or I can't figure out how to get it to work).

Thanks!

I had to format the card before it worked. Since then, perfect.

What do you mean by match the command codes? Will it work automatically with the 210 remote or you have to reprogram the remote or player? Any idea how to do this? I have the 210 and would be looking to use the remote with the 500.

Thanks, I'll give it a try tomorrow. Quick question though, there's 0 info in the manual, so how do you set bookmarks.

It depends on the disc. I find it is the green button near the bottom of the remote, more often than not.

Because what looks better to you does not mean it will look better to me.

Any panny remote works with any panny player. You don't have to do anything. Been this way since the 90's. If you pick up a 15 yr old panny remote, it will work your 500 immediately.

I think you are misunderstanding... as that's not what he stated. He said if both players are doing what they should they will be identical... in a lot of cases many aren't even when you attempt to bypass the user settings.

That's correct. In this example, I haven't tested either player. However the Sony S590 is incorrect with RGB output, so if you are using RGB or Auto, you might be getting incorrect output with a Sony player right now. Similarly if you use any mode other than the standard mode, or use any of the "enhancements" offered.

With the Panasonic, the Enhanced Chroma function will skew the output from the player, even if it is in standard mode (this is based of objective data last year, and subjective visual examination by a friend), and so then it won't be identical.

DVD playback is a totally different boat. Also since most people (including myself) can't run two displays side-by-side that are identical it's impossibly hard to compare two players effectively without using some test patterns and hard data I've found. Spotting any difference in Blu-ray content is likely impossible unless a player is doing it wrong.

You are saying that many are not doing what they should. Do you have a list?

Sony S590 YCbCr is perfect.

Hello, first of all greetings to all from Spain. I write here because unfortunately in Spain this player is not going to sell and it´s hard to find people who have it.

Someone could tell me if you have option to move the subtitles? Have you option to move the image from 16.9 to 21.9 (1.85:1 to 2.35:1 I don´t how it says around here)?

Sorry for my English. Regards

LOL LOL

Time for you to get out of the LAB, get a few experts and let them see the picture quality themselves and make their own decisions. You don't seem to understand that companies calibrate their blu ray players so that the default setting shows the best possible picture for their machine. People then can play with the settings the way they like. Who wants all Blu Ray picture quality to be the same for every machine. Even Consumer Reports will tell you that all Blu Ray picture quality are excellent but the ratings are mostly based on the best picture. In their case for the 2011 machines, it was 1. LG 690, 2. LG 670 and 3. OPPO 93, the Panny 210 and Sony S780, 580 fell below the top 3.

I always love the comment by many others "Shut off all the enhancements" so you can get the best picture" Companies calibrate using the default settings. Very funny stuff.

On a well transferred movie (you know film like, the original source stuff) Shutting off the enhancements does at least for me, has the best playback. Sad thing is, this is only true for about 60% of blurays give or take a few. But hey mp3's are way most listen to there music and most love the look of the "soap opera effect" on most modern Led's and other displays . I say sure if it needs it tweak away as we have options to do so, but already tweaked out the gate is akin to" jumping the gun" and disqualifies you from the race

Thanks for the feedback.

I just purchased this player after my Sammy died. I connected via digital coax to my panny SA-XR55K receiver, which has 7.1 analog inputs, but I don't have any analog cables available so I went the coax route. However, right now I only have a 3.0 system (L,R,C), so I'm wondering since I only have a 3.0 if I should stick with the coax or do the analog? Will there be any difference?

Also, regarding the correct settings for the digital audio outs, should I have both Dolby & DTS set to bitstream and the DVD audio secondary set to "on"? My Sammy had an actual speaker configuration page which I set to 3.0, but I don't see that on the 500.

Finally, i have one minor quibble about the player and it's that when playing audio CD's it doesn't display artist/album/track info. It's connected to the internet, it could easily query gracenote or freedb.

Thanks!

So how would you define "Best Picture Quality"? Would that be seeing exactly how the director and mastering engineer saw it? In that case you'd want to have a display calibrated as close to standards as possible, and have a Blu-ray player that outputs the bitstream exactly as it was encoded on the disc. The player "enhancing" that doesn't present the best image if that is what you want, and that's often the goal for most people here I would say.

We test everything the way it ships as the default. I also test every single mode and processing feature on the player if possible. I know what most of them do, I know the positive and negative effects they have on the picture, and in what cases they could present a benefit. I also know that my opinion of what is good is almost certainly not the same as someone else, and so relying strictly on my subjective ideas would lead most people down the wrong path.

I haven't read the Consumer Reports reviews, but I've tested and used the LG 670, the Sony S580, the Oppo 93, and the Panasonic 210. Defaults, the LG is incorrect and colors come out too dim, so you're missing details. The Sony is also too dim by default, so you miss highlights. The Panasonic 210 and the Oppo 93 are perfect. The put out exactly what is on the disc.

Do they use an ISF calibrated display? I have no idea. Do they turn on a TV, put it in THX mode, and say that's good enough? Possibly, I don't know. Do they put a heavy emphasis on streaming content and network playback in addition to video? No clue. Do the LG and Sony put out picture that will look visibly worse in many areas compared to the Panasonic and Oppo? Yes.

Do you know what Enhanced Chroma does on the Panasonic? Have you tested it and seen it with your eyes? I really enjoy the "Get out of the lab" comments, because you're relying on testing from Consumer Reports, in their lab, which is completely subject to bias, and ignoring testing from us, which is rooted in objective data you can't refute. I'm not saying that I think Enhanced Chroma looks bad, I'm saying it affects the output in such a way that it degrades the image, and there's hard proof of that.

If you can offer proof why the LG picture is better that the Oppo or Panasonic, I'd love to hear it. If you're going to answer "I think it looks better", then I can easily say "My JVC VHS player from 1992 still can't be beat" and have the same validity, it's why I use data for this, not just eyeballing something.

Edit: I forgot that HDPERSON prefers to watch things in Dynamic mode, so he doesn't see any shadow or highlight detail anyway, and certainly doesn't have his display calibrated. So if you want to lose shadow and highlight details, and have colors blown out, his subjective opinion is in line with yours. I'll ignore him next time.

I'm not to smart in regards to audio. Hopefully one of you can help.

I have a 9.2 room i'm in the process of building (it's audessy DSX, wide and heights).

I'm using the Denon 4311CI with the Audessy DSX enabled, off to my epson 8700 ub projector.

I first purchased the Panasonic BDT-220 because of the reviews I saw.

I sat with a panasonic engineer on Friday (he was out training some store employees). He was telling me about the 7.1 analog output and such.

But will that matter for me?

With my setup, and receiver doing the main processing for DSX should I run HDMI and let it do it's thing or let the panasonic sent out analog 7.1?

Can someone help clarify?

Also, will I gain anything in picture quality versus the 220?

1) Used HDMI. You don't need analog unless you like to listening to analog for the DAC, i.e. music.

2) Regarding 220 vs. 500 via HDMI and features someone else who has the 220 can answer that question. I have the 500 and really like it. BD playback is what I like.

Panasonic doesn't have a Dynamic mode. Are you sure that you tested the Panasonic? I don't know what you are talking about. But I do like LAB experts like you telling people that they are not seeing what they are seeing. As for LG, contact Consumer Reports, I am sure they would be happy to share information with you.

So you will not respond to me, nikce going ruinning away from some disagreeing with you. That is Okay because I just enjoy the humor of some of your reports here.

I was quoting you from the Samsung D6500 thread: "I kept the Panasonic 210 for DVD up conversion, using normal setting and +2 for detail clarity. Both the Panny and Samsung offer top DVD upconversion, but the Samsung is unbeatable for Blu Ray PQ in the Dynamic mode."

Edit: Here's a link to the quote: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...2#post21435452

I'm not telling you that you aren't seeing what you're seeing. I'm saying exactly what Dynamic mode does: Instead of seeing Blue from 16-235, you only see Blue from 16-201, where the average dE error introduced is 8.2. Green is reduced the same, only with an error of 9.8, and Red has a dE of 7.5. The images attached show what it does, as the top is correct and the bottom is the Samsung, and you can see it gets way too bright, too fast, and hits the maximum value way before the end of the bar.

For the Panasonic 210 I have the data for Normal, Fine, and Cinema mode, with and without Advanced Chroma. Advanced Chroma slightly lowers the Luma output, so you lose a couple steps of shadow detail and your highlights are reduced, as well as losing multiple levels in between. Gradients and shadows can look a bit blocky from this, though not nearly as bad as with Dynamic on the Samsung.

I don't run away, or tell people they don't think they're seeing what they're seeing. I'm saying if you're running Dynamic on your Samsung, which you said less than two months ago gave you the best Blu-ray picture, then you must like a blown our picture with no shadow detail or highlights, since that is what it produces. You're missing 16% of the dynamic range of your picture, and the colors are all messed up, but that's what you like. However, if you're going to tell everyone that is the best picture, and I have the numbers explaining what that image is, I'm going to use those to explain what your preference is, as that probably doesn't line up with everyone else.

Consumer Reports would be happy to share it with me if I pay for it, but since I'm 99% sure I have more objective data and testing on most players than Consumer Reports, I'm not likely to do that.

Chris,

I really appreciate your objective responses at it relates to blu-ray PQ. I personally don't put a lot in others subjective preferences. I personally prefer my picture to be accurate and then if I or someone wants to tweak the picture to our liking, then so be it. However, I don't want the picture out of the box to be screwed up. I would hope eveyone would at a minimum want the picture to be accurate as a baseline, but that is not the case based on the several threads I belong to including this one. I guess to each his own. The bottom line is that we like the final output right or wrong. This is one of those cases where ignorance can sometimes be bliss.

+1

Stick with the coax.
a) The processing done by players to produce audio on their stereo analog outputs usually is not the best.
b) The AVR does no processing of its multichannel analog inputs. If the player doesn't support de-selecting speakers as part of its multichannel analog configuration, audio sent by the player to the LFE and surround channels will be lost to you.


If you select secondary audio, you'll only get stereo on the digital audio connection. See pg 29 of the 500's manual. This is because the player has to decode the audio from the movie's audio to PCM in order to mix in the secondary audio. The 500 does not include a Dolby surround sound encoder which it would need in order to regenerate a multichannel signal. Digital coax and optical audio connections support only stereo PCM and lossy DolbyDigital and DTS multichannel audio. You need an HDMI-capable AVR to get multichannel PCM or bitstreamed lossless Dolby or DTS multichannel audio.


Speaker setup is mentioned on page 30 of the 500's manual. It claims you can specify whether or not a speaker is present. You should be able to set LFE and surround speakers to "not present". I don't have a 500, so I can't verify this.


The 500 does not include Gracenote support. Maybe next year's equivalent will.

Several things:

1. Bringing up comments from Home Theater HiFi magazine is very unprofessional of you, because it has nothing do with this discusssion and I would WARN anyone wishing to comment on tests in the magazine, this indivdual will try to use it against you elsewhere. I may contact the editor with a complaint.

2. A few years ago you tested the Sony S570 and recommended it because you like the picture quality. Then you got your little toys and the numbers didn't add up, so you changed your recommendation to not. So these numbers told you that you were not seeing what you thought. LOL

3. Consumer reports has all of the equipment you have and also use expert viewers and their results a published in their 2012 guide. You can read it.

4. You can go to CNET 2012 Blu ray player reviews and click on the Blu Ray player comparison chart.

I'm confused how using something you said, regardless of where you said it, in the context of a relevant discussion is unprofessional?


Can you link to the change? I remember just waiting on the numbers. I don't believe his opinion went from good to bad as much as just added the information about the specific errors. I could be wrong on that. I usually don't particularly care if someone likes/dislikes the picture. I prefer the failed/passed tests and color pass-thru tests when it comes to video. I can choose like/dislike from a subjective standpoint on my own. Which means I prefer Smackrabbits approach by a wide margin.


Using Consumer Reports as a technical source is like using the Onion for a political source.

CNet review:

Performance: Perfectly average

"Performance may be the most important criteria for HDTVs and speakers, but it's almost irrelevant when it comes to choosing a Blu-ray player. Last year, we found that all major manufacturers' Blu-ray players had nearly identical image quality, and so far in 2012 the players show similar performance in terms of speed, too.

I still put the DMP-BDT220 through its paces to check Blu-ray image quality, DVD image quality, disc-loading speed, and Netflix image quality. Blu-ray and DVD image quality were unsurprisingly excellent, as you'll find on any modern Blu-ray player. Netflix streaming quality was also great, looking as good with HD content as any other player. Because many buyers complained about problems with last year's DMP-BDT210's Netflix streaming, I watched several programs, but didn't see any major issues, aside from occasional lip sync problems that occur on all Netflix devices. (I didn't have problems with Netflix on my review sample of the DMP-BDT210 either.)"


Charles R says the opposite.

Thanks. Should I be using the dual HDMIs one for video one for audio? I guess that would only "help" if the hdmi bandwidth is not enough to support full quality everything, so its compressing?

Does anyone else have the answer about picture quality of the 500 vs. 220? Is there a difference?