I took delivery of Panasonic’s new DMP-BD30 Blu-ray player earlier today. It’s not a new product as such, as it’s been on sale in the USA for a while already. As usual, Europeans had to wait a few months to get theirs. Here are photos of the unit’s unboxing, with some brief comments.
Delay is not always a bad thing: European BD30 ships with DIVX support which was initially absent from the US version. Panasonic has probably already included the feature in a firmware upgrade for the US model. Maybe.
The box contains two Blu-ray Discs, Cars and Ratatouille. Kudos to Panasonic, since those two titles offer incredible video and audio — and Ratatouille happens to be the best movie of 2007, in my humble opinion.
BD30 supports SD/SDHC cards, AVCHD and hires JPEGs. I had shot some concert footage with my Panasonic HDC-SD7 (15mbps AVCHD/1080i) so I took the SDHC out of the camera and inserted it into BD30’s card slot. A press of remote’s BD/SD button switched the player to memory card mode. A few seconds later contents of the card were displayed on screen. I selected the first file, pressed enter and ta-dah, concert footage played without problems. And it looked pretty darn good, too.
Nothing really special in the rear panel. HDMI, S-video, optical & coax digital audio out, composite and component video, stereo & 5.1ch audio outputs. I haven’t read the manual yet (well, duh!) so I don’t know if analog audio outputs can be configured for 7.1ch output.
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