
Our old Dell plasma quit on us last month and Dell refuses to sell parts to repair their TVs so our choices boiled down to buying a new set or quit watching TV altogether. We picked out a TV (Panasonic 42-inch G10 plasma) and, low and behold, Amazon threw this Blu-ray player into the deal for free. After a short period of deliberation (lasting one second) we decided against quitting TV watching and jumped on it.
The blu-ray discs we have played were very good. The surprise was that it plays DVDs almost just as well. I do not know whether this is because of the higher quality display or if the player does a particularly good job of upconverting. The DVDs we played showed a markedly better picture when compared to the old setup which was an Oppo player hooked up to the 720p Dell plasma. Anyway, if you are using this unit with a 1080P display, your DVDs are going to look really good.
Amazon gave us a five dollar credit to try out their Video on Demand service. We gave it a try and watched an episode of 'The Office' in HD. Our player is hooked up to a wired network and our DSL internet connection speed is middling. The playback was flawless with no buffering at all. Absolutely perfect. However, the service is too expensive to use very much.
SOCIAL COMMENTARY: I wonder where all of these digital gizmos and high def entertainments are taking us. I am pretty sure I can keep it in perspective because I grew up before the Onslaught. But I'm worried about the Post-Onslaught crowd.
I'm giving this four stars instead of five because it does not yet connect to the Netflix streaming service. We have a Netflix subscription and we want to use it with our TV but we can't. And we can't buy a Roku player either because if we did then Panasonic would announce Netflix functionality for this product first thing in the morning the next day. So that's where it sits. But we are happy anyway. Thanks to Amazon for the good deal.
UPDATE: If your TV has a VGA port and you have a laptop with an open VGA port, you can watch Netflix instant movies on your TV using your laptop as the data source. Get a VGA cable long enough to go from wherever you will place your laptop to the VGA port on your TV (you can get one cheap from Amazon). On your computer, go into your display settings and set it to multiple screens. Then set your TV display setting to get data from the VGA port. Then start your Netflix movie on the laptop and it will be shown on the TV simultaneously. You can use your laptop speakers for sound or you can connect your laptop sound card to somewhere on the TV or your receiver. Its pretty clunky but it works. My setup is a laptop with a wired network connection, a good video card, and a 1080p plasma TV and the picture was very good.
If you have a laptop with a DVI port and your TV has an open HDMI port, you can connect with a 'DVI to HDMI' cable and I would presume that this would give you an even better picture although I have not tried this.
BTW, the Netflix instant movie selection is not all that bad, IMHO.
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