Panasonic DMP-BD10

Panasonic enters the Blu-ray arena with a costly killer.

Hot on the heels of Samsung's BD-P1000 comes the UK's second Blu-ray player. There's not much between the two products in terms of their features, but full marks to Panasonic for making their player £300 costlier than the already over-priced Samsung! This has 7.1-channel analogue audio to the Samsung's 5.1, but on the other hand, the Samsung has a memory card reader and this doesn't. Where does that extra dosh go?

Not on the styling, that's for sure. This thing is butt-ugly, and the disc tray feels like it would snap off if you so much as used harsh language to it. The remote control is similarly hideous, and annoyingly unresponsive to boot.

Once you've snapped up the front cover to hide its ugly fascia and settled back in your La-Z-Boy, things improve markedly, though. At 1080p resolution (720p and 1080i are also supported) on a Pioneer PDP-5000EX [reviewed p78], even the kind of crap currently predominant on Blu-ray (SWAT, Ultraviolet, etc) is a joy to watch. The colours of a street parade in SWAT leap off the screen - and you can even make out Samuel L Jackson's head-stubble! The only visual flaw is a little judder during slow pans.

Interestingly, as with the Samsung, switching the quality down to the theoretically inferior 1080i yields almost no discernable dip in quality. DVD upscaling, up to 1080p, isn't bad, but - unlike the cheaper Toshiba HD-XE1 HD-DVD player - this doesn't have HDMI 1.3, which means no lossless Dolby TrueHD surround sound for you.

Overall, the improved picture quality and 7.1 surround give this the narrowest of edges over the Samsung. It's still FAR too expensive, though.

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