Panasonic DMP-BDT310 review

It might not be the cheapest Blu-ray player that you can buy, but Panasonic has built some clever features into the DMP-BDT310 that may just make it the player for some people.

For starters, there are two HDMI outputs on the rear. One is an HDMI 1.4 port, capable of carrying 3D video; the other one is an HDMI 1.3 port, which is just for carrying HD audio to an old amp that doesn’t have HDMI 1.4 inputs. If you’ve got a decent old amp and don’t want to have to upgrade it, then this is the Blu-ray player for you.

This player also has Panasonic’s High Clarity Sound mode, which disables the analogue video output to stop any potential interference it may cause to a Blu-ray disc’s audio. Hi-Fi purists will love having this feature, but we couldn’t hear any difference.

Performance of a player is incredibly important and Panasonic has worked hard on this year’s models to make them faster. For staretrs, there’s a touch-free sensor on top that you wave your hand over to quickly open the disc tray. To be honest, this is more of a gimmick than must have feature and the easily accessible Eject buttons on the player and remote are probably more useful.

What’s not a gimmick is performance. From power-off, we managed to insert a disc and load it in just 25 seconds. This is reduced to 19 seconds when the player is already turned on. Suffice to say that as Blu-ray players go this one is very quick.

When you power the player on you get Panasonic’s brand-new menu system. This uses large icons for all of the features, arranged in a cross. All you do is hit the corresponding cursor key to select the option you want. It’s much more intuitive than regular systems and responds very quickly. We like the way that you can customise the screens with a photo of your choice, too.

When playing 3D movies the player has some tricks up its sleeve. You can adjust the 3D depth, although this can swing from being quite subtle to headache inducing. More useful is the ability to add a frame around the image. This fades the main picture to the colour frame you choose (black is best), so that the image doesn’t touch the bezel of the screen. It helps create the illusion of 3D without the harsh lines of the bezel interrupting. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it’s a good option.

As most people seem to want to have the option, there’s a 2D-to-3D conversion mode. As you can expect, it’s not particularly good. Our advice is to watch 2D movies in 2D and 3D movies in 3D.

For other forms of entertainment, you can hook the BDT310 up to your home network using either the wired network port or the built-in 802.11n wireless. From here you can stream videos, music and photos from a UPnP server. We found that most of our test videos worked, but our HD MKV file kept pausing during playback over wired or wireless.

The same kinds of files can also be played from USB devices, plugged into either the front or rear USB ports. When we connected a USB flash drive our test MKV file played perfectly, showing that our network speed was to blame. If you’re having problems with HD files, it’s worth connecting storage directly.

Panasonic has upgraded its TVs this year to Viera Connect, but the BDT310 still uses the older Viera Cast system. This doesn’t have access to iPlayer, which is a shame. With just YouTube, Picasa Web Albums and AceTrax video rental available, it’s lacking when compared to internet portals from Samsung and Sony.

There’s all of the other usual features that you’d expect to find in a modern Blu-ray player, including Deep Color and YCbCr (4:4:4) colour output.

There are cheaper Blu-ray players and there are ones with better internet portals, but if you don’t care about internet content (or you’ve got this on your TV) and have an older amp, this is the player to buy. Panasonic also sells a version with just a single HDMI output, the DMP-BDT210, but it’s only around £10 cheaper.