CUSTOM INSTALLATION HOW-TO

PERFORMANCE

The first high-def disc players were painfully slow at loading. The BD55 is a speed demon by comparison: It only took 20 seconds to power up and load a BD-Live Blu-ray Disc, while DVDs and non-BD-Live Blu-ray Discs started playing in a mere 15 seconds.

The DMP-BD55 features a new version of the PHL Reference Chroma Processor Plus found in earlier Panasonic players. What's changed is that the processor now upsamples the image's color up to 4:4:4 bit-depth. (Movies are typically encoded for disc at a 4:2:0 color bit-depth.) While the benefits of this can be subjectively appreciated, what really brought it home was a demo I saw where a Panasonic engineer ran a test disc with a special Chroma Zone plate pattern on the BD55. Compared with a Samsung BD-UP5000 Blu-ray player, the Panasonic clearly displayed better color resolution in the pattern's overlapping concentric rings.

As I watched Transformers on Blu-ray, the BD55's picture looked remarkably detailed and punchy. In a scene where Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) flips over the handlebars of the girls' bike he's riding past a prominently placed Burger King, the pink bike and red/orange signage in the background looked vivid and clean. And when the mysterious muscle car that's been chasing him enters the scene, its yellow body paint displayed a wide range of finely delineated hues. The same scenes viewed in 1080i using the player's component-video output looked notably softer when compared with HDMI, but that's often the case with Blu-ray players and other high-def sources.

The player's upconversion of regular DVDs was also very impressive. It passed all of the tough upconversion tests on the Silicon Optix HQV DVD with the exception of the Assorted Cadence test. Compared with other high-def disc and upconverting DVD players I've handled, its performance here rivals, if not exceeds, the best of them.

The BD55 had no problem passing Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstreams on to the Denon receiver, and the same tracks also sounded great when conveyed through the player's multichannel analog-audio output. The setup menu for the analog output lets you select a large or small speaker size, adjust channel delays, and trim the output level for all main channels. But there's no test tone to adjust subwoofer output, so I wasn't shocked when the bass sounded weak as I watched a scene from X-Men: The Last Stand where Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) have some kind of mind-control face-off. When I switched over to an HDMI connection, the DTS Master Audio soundtrack's bottom end had far greater authority when Xavier, and the house he's sitting in, exploded.

After testing out the player's BD-Live capability using Transformers and Men in Black, I don't have much to say about this feature other than it works. Men in Black's BD-Live screen let me download a high-def trailer for Lakeview Terrace. And Transformers let me download a "skin" that enclosed the image within a window containing "widgets" that delivered extra information like GPS tracking points for the movie's locales and technical data on its robots. Exciting stuff, that.

BOTTOM LINE

My past reluctance to recommend a specific Blu-ray player was based on one key point: There were too few models that delivered all of the format's capabilities. But now comes Pansasonic's DMP-BD55, a Profile 2.0 BD-Live-capable player with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio decoding, HDMI 1.3 and 7.1-channel analog outputs, and more. Panasonic's $399 player also delivers both excellent audio and video performance with Blu-ray Discs and stellar upconversion of regular DVDs. My assessment of the DMP-BD55? Highly recommended.