Panasonic Unveils Second-Gen Blu-ray Disc Player

With a small legion of print and online media (TheManRoom included) as an attentive audience, Panasonic lifted a blue shroud and enthusiastically unveiled their second-generation Blu-ray Disc player, the DMP-BD30, at their Hollywood Labs theater on Tuesday.

The DMP-BD30 is roughly an inch shorter and inch wider than its DMP-BD10 predecessor, most apparent upon seeing the unit up-close and in person. The player’s diminutive stature didn’t stop Panasonic from including a front-accessible SD Memory Card slot compatible with HD camcorders or digital cameras via EZ Sync. The player is capable of displaying .webp photos on a card onto a television screen and playing the photos as a slideshow, all while it simultaneously plays music from a CD inserted into the player’s drive.

On the technical side, Panasonic has included the Blu-ray Disc Association’s new Final Standard Profile spec for advanced features, the first such player to be made available on the market. This allows the player to utilize discs authored in BD-ROM Profile 1 Version 1.1 to have two separate audio and video streams running simultaneously, allowing the user to select which video or audio stream they want during select moments of the film.

Panasonic aims for the DMP-BD30 to be one of the best looking and sounding players on the market, and the demonstration we received makes this hard to refute. The player utilizes P4HD (Pixel Precision Progressive Processing for HD) technology, used in the previous model, along with the PHL Reference Chroma Processor capable of better reproducing finer detail and HDMI version 1.3 with Deep Color function. Naturally, the DMP-BD30 will support up to 7-channels of the latest lossless audio codecs including DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby TrueHD, and PCM.

The DMP-BD30 will carry an SRP of $499 and be available in North America on November 12.

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