The BD30 impressed me right out of the gate with its zippy operation and clean handling of discs. The Panasonic is fast, as high-def players go. Without a disc loaded, the boot time from power-up to the ready screen was only 20 seconds, and most Blu-ray Discs I tried required only 45 to 50 seconds to go from the close of the tray to the FBI warning. Standard DVDs took 20 to 25 seconds to load and start playing.

High-def image quality for Blu-ray titles on the BD30 was spectacular, and completely in line with what I've seen on our reference TV from other HD DVD and BD players. Across the Universe, a rock musical based on the Beatles repertoire and set in the turbulent '60s, delivered a range of stunning images, from the subtle, gray dankness of the working-class Liverpool that birthed the Fab Four to the brighter, uplifting tones of the sun-drenched American landscape.

In one early scene on a high-school football field, the Dayton Wildcats and their cheerleaders practice in vivid dark-green uniforms emblazoned with a deep taxicab-yellow W that nearly leapt from the screen. When the camera zoomed in for a close-up of one of the cheerleaders singing a slow cover of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," I could clearly see the layer of pancake makeup on her face.

The sound from this disc's Dolby TrueHD track (as confirmed by the receiver's front-panel display) was what I've come to expect from uncompressed PCM or TrueHD tracks heard via the onboard decoding in other players. That is, it was clean, incredibly dynamic, and exhibited the uncanny openness that seems to separate lossless from traditional lossy (core Dolby Digital and DTS) compression.

I was similarly satisfied with the crisp, vivid look of the animation in Meet the Robinsons and the well-mixed surround effects from that disc's uncompressed PCM soundtrack. But I was able to confirm earlier reports that, in an odd quirk, the BD30's subwoofer channel measures about 5 to 6 dB lower in level when delivered via HDMI instead of through the optical or coaxial bitstream output. This could make it hard to set levels to match other digital components in a system, but Panasonic has since addressed the issue in its latest Version 1.6 firmware upgrade, released in late February and available through the company's Web site. (Google "BD30 firmware download" and find the URL that begins "panasonic.jp/support.") This upgrade also addressed HDMI incompatibility issues encountered with some Samsung HDTVs, while earlier firmware upgrades mostly addressed title-specific playback issues.

While Blu-ray content via the BD30's component-video output (at that output's maximum resolution of 1080i) also looked crisp, standard-def DVDs were another matter. Films like The Rookie and the Legends of Jazz TV series (shot in high-def video and downscaled for DVD) generally looked very good. But the BD30's upconversion of 480i to either 1080i or 1080p 24/60 looked subtly softer than what I'm used to seeing from the best upconverting high-def players. This isn't a deal breaker, though. The Panasonic also showed some jaggies (breakup on diagonal lines) on the torture tests found on the Silicon Optix HQV test disc. It also showed unusually bad breakup of the alpha characters on that disc's horizontal screen-crawl test, which scrolls video across film-based material as you might see with a TV newsflash. But that condition should never come up in disc-based content.

This being a Profile 1.1 player, I fired up one of the few BD-ROM 1.1 discs out there, Resident Evil: Extinction, and checked out its picture-in-picture function. When you engage this extra, a box occasionally appears on-screen featuring the director or one of the actors adding live commentary while the movie continues to run in the background. (The soundtrack is lowered so it doesn't interfere with the commentary.) This worked flawlessly in my audition, and Panasonic continues to address any PIP glitches it encounters in its firmware upgrades.

BOTTOM LINE

Blu-ray Disc players selling for less than $500 are still scarce - Sony's PS3 game console, which starts at less than $400, remains one of the best values around. But among standalone models, you'll be hard-pressed to find a $500 player that's as pretty to look at or as well equipped, or that works as smoothly as Panasonic's DMP-BD30. It's not without its compromises, and it'll no doubt be seeing a lot of new competition this year. But for now, this is a quite recommendable entry in a narrow field.