The Panasonic DMP-BD30 is the world's first Profile 1.1 Blu-ray player.
A certain amount of deserved fanfare is in order, as some of you will be aware that the BD market has been cursed by dithering standards.
Profile 1.1 (also amusingly know as the Final Standards profile - which it isn't) mandates for persistent memory and a second video decoder, allowing for the provision of Picture-in-Picture functionality, aka Bonus View.
Sometime later in 2008, we'll see the first dedicated BD players compliant with Profile 2.0, which throws a LAN port into the mix, letting the unit go online for greater interactivity.
New Blu-ray special features
Even Bonus View PIP discs are few and far between. The first in the UK is Sony Pictures' Resident Evil: Extinction. Select its Under the Umbrella special feature and you can watch the film plus a secondary video window featuring talking-head commentary, behind-the-scenes material and storyboards.
Disney will be releasing its first Profile 1.1 disc in the summer, National Treasure: Book of Secrets. In the US, Sunshine has also been issued as a Region-locked PIP disc.
A different proposition to the first models from Panasonic, the Panasonic DMP-BD30's form factor itself has been much improved. The player is super-slim, standing just 59mm tall. Ergonomics are a bit bonkers, though.
An odd layout from Panasonic
The Disc Open button is bizarrely located to the right (opposite to the disc loading tray itself) while the Power button sits above the disc tray to the left. This arrangement is as logical as a loft full of Big Brother contestants. I often turned off the player by mistake when instinctively seeking to eject a disc.
If you're looking to buy into Blu-ray, it's because you want a disc-spinner that will blow your socks off visually, and this Panasonic doesn't disappoint. When it comes to picture clarity, the BD30 is probably the best BD player yet to grace our Tech Labs.
Its predecessor, the BD10A, was no slouch, but this model squeezes even more delicious hi-def detail out of Blu-ray platters, adding an extra polish to 1080p picture fidelity. Side-by-side with a PlayStation 3, it offered demonstrably more picture information with fewer visual artefacts.
Greater detail from your Blu-ray disc
By way of comparison, I compared the Skull and Crossbones menu sequence from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. In the lower background waves, a greater level of smooth and coherent detail is visible on the Panasonic when viewed alongside the same sequence played on a PS3.
This can largely be attributed to the brand's UniPhier video processing LSI, which incorporates both P4HD (Pixel Precision Progressive processing) picture processing (designed to handle all deinterlacing and scaling duties, and able to process more than 15 billion pixels per second) and a new PHL Reference Chroma Processor, derived from technology used at Panasonic's Hollywood-based authoring facility.
Thrilling audio
Audio performance is equally thrilling, but setup is complicated and there are caveats. The BD30 is compatible with both common (DD5.1/DTS) and hi-res audio formats.
Given that studios cannot seemingly agree on any coherent defacto audio system for Blu-ray (lossless PCM, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA all being used for A-list titles) this is significant.
The player must be configured via the sub-menu to squirt them out as a bitstream in order to deliver Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA soundtracks. And you'll need a receiver with suitable decoders on board to handle these audio formats.
Alternatively, you can output them as PCM, although this is derived from either the core/standard DTS mix or Dolby Digital 5.1 downmix - it isn't lossless.
High definition PIP
There's also another catch; you can't have audio to the PIP sub-window if you want to stream an HD audio format. You can only listen to the Secondary Audio feed to the PIP Bonus View sub-menu if you select PCM as your audio output format of choice.
This is irritating, as it means cinephile's will end up watching the movie with one menu setting and then have to go back into the player's setup menus to engage the Secondary Audio mode if they want to enjoy a PIP feature!
I tested the two Panasonic BD30s (one American, the other European) with Resident Evil 3 and the US release of Sunshine; the player managed each Profile 1.1 sub-menu without problem.
Panasonic deal with Java
One aspect that separates top-flight BD players from lesser models is their ability to handle BD Java.
The good news is that this model is significantly faster than its predecessor and many other dedicated models on the market. This means shorter disc-loading times and more responsive menu navigation. The BD30 loads the Java-heavy Day After Tomorrow in approx 54 seconds.
Disc compatibility is extensive. The deck spins both BD-RE and BD-R recordable discs, plus RAM (only caddy-less discs), DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/+RW and DL discs, CD/CD-R/CD-RW, DivX-encoded videos and, of course, Blu-ray and DVD, locked to Region's B and 2 respectively.