Mature Blu

摘要

Such is the pace of technology, and the scramble to patch both HDMI and Profile standards, that no sooner had we completed our review of Panasonic's DMP-BD30 Blu-ray player than its replacement, the DMP-BD50, was announced. Appearances alone do little to separate the slim chassis, mirrored drop-down fascia, HDMI and 5.1 channel connectivity of either model. In practice it's all about an update in Blu-ray 'Profile' from 1.1 to 2.0 in this latest DMP-BD50 version. With 'BD-Live' now fully operational, it's possible to download and store 'bonus' and interactive content for replay through the DMP-BD50 itself. Under the bonnet, Panasonic's core 'UniPhier' processor unpacks MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, VC1 and WMV9 video with de-interlacing, chroma processing, noise reduction and scaling options on board. The 'BD50 also decodes DTS-HD Master and High Resolution Audio along with Dolby TrueHD. In practice, however, both players are limited to 5.1 audio channels from their analogue outputs while delivering multichannel LPCM, Dolby and DTS HD bitstreams via HDMI 1.3. As expected, this HDMI connection also accommodates scaled video outputs from 480p up to 1080/60p and 1080/24p (although, along with other menu functions this cannot be adjusted on-the-fly), the latter delivering original movie content without any frame-rate conversion.