Audio Video News

Panasonic showed a couple of new products at a New York press event yesterday. One, the third-generation DMP-BD50 Blu-ray player, is important. The other, the SC-BT100 compact surround system, is fascinating.

Starting with the important one: The DMP-BD50 is slimmer than any previous Panasonic Blu-ray player. It's a BD-Live (aka Profile 2.0) player, so it's up to the minute with interactive features on any disc and can download them from the net. And it's compatible with all the new surround codecs, including Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus, and both flavors of DTS-HD--Master Audio and High Resolution Audio. The Viera Link will interface with other networked components, including Panasonic's world-class Viera plasmas. There's an SD memory card slot for your camcorder or still pics.

The new Blu-ray player also includes UniPhier video processing technology, which originated at Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory. That processing may appear in other products (now that Panasonic is making panels for Pioneer). Unique to Panasonic products, however, is the PHL Reference Chroma processor, which upsamples the color information on the disc to generate better transitions between small areas of color--the example mentioned was a yellow star in a blue sky. The player ships in spring for $699.95.

What was arresting about the SC-BT100 home theater in a box system was, first of all, the sound. It was pretty good. Panasonic is using bamboo-fiber drivers and they have a warmish sound similar to paper drivers in well-designed products. They certainly weren't ringy, as many metal tweeters are, even on a loud highway-mayhem scene from Die Hard 4. They even performed well in stereo, a trick managed by very few compact surround systems. Though the demo had the center speaker placed horizontally, all the satellites were otherwise identical in size and driver array.

The subwoofer is cunningly constructed with both an active driver, embedded in the middle of the enclosure, and a passive one, on the front. There's no port turbulence because there's no port. Desirable features include Blu-ray drive, SD card slot, a wireless transmitter for the surround speakers, and iPod dock, the latter having pride of place in the center of the front panel. The full complement of Dolbys and DTSes, old and new, are supported. The system ships in spring for $999.95.