Panasonic DMP-BDT500 review

When putting together a home cinema system, it’s all too easy to overlook the Blu-ray player. After all, isn’t picture quality mostly dictated by your TV and sound quality by your amplifier? Contrary to popular belief, a high-quality Blu-ray player can make all the difference to both image and sound quality, which is why Panasonic has developed the DMP-BDT500. It’s a premium Blu-ray player with high-quality audio components and image processing.

The BDT500 is built from a combination of glossy mirror-finish plastic and brushed aluminium, and is one of the best looking Blu-ray players we’ve seen – it’s a massive improvement over some of Panasonic’s less expensive systems, and you already feel you’re getting a premium product before you even take a look at the specification.

The disc tray, LCD display and front connections are all hidden behind a flip-down panel, which helps maintain the player’s clean lines, and the touch-sensitive power and playback buttons are recessed into the roof of the unit. An SDXC card reader and single USB port are easily accessible from the front of the player.

The DMP-BDT500 is the first Blu-ray player we’ve seen with two HDMI outputs – Panasonic suggests dedicating the second output purely to audio, which seems like overkill. The HDMI specification was designed to take audio bandwidth considerations into account, and as a digital signal it won’t degrade in the same way it might over analogue cables, but some audio fanatics may consider it a welcome inclusion.

The same can be said of the analogue 5.1 and 7.1 phono speaker outputs, which you can use to connect to your surround sound amplifier if you’d rather the BWT-DM500 took care of your surround sound decoding. This can be useful if your amplifier doesn’t support the latest surround sound audio formats. There are also coaxial and digital optical audio inputs, plus Ethernet, a single USB port and a composite video output, making the DMP-BDT500 a seriously well-equipped player.

In practice, the DMP-BDT500 produced some stunning Full HD video from our reference Blu-ray discs, helped by the detailed settings menus that let you tweak picture quality to suit your TV or projector. Noise reduction, edge-smoothing and standard definition up-scaling, as well as brightness, colour and contrast settings are all available for tweaking, but even out of the box pictures were detailed and vibrant. Even darker scenes preserved plenty of detail, with clear shadow tones.

Whether you opt to connect to a set of dedicated speakers using HDMI or the analogue audio outputs, there’s little argument that the DMP-BDT500 sounds fantastic. With Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio support, Blu-ray films get the presence they deserve, with incredibly clear and detailed sound. Panasonic has even gone to the trouble to emulate the sound of a valve amplifier, letting you choose between varying levels of warmth, or of course you can disable it if you prefer an unaltered sound.

As well as Blu-ray playback, the DMP-BDT500 has plenty of extra features that make it well worth connecting to your local network. You could run a cable from your router to your home cinema setup, but the integrated Wi-Fi dongle is much simpler. The player supports DLNA, so you’ll be able to stream multimedia files from a PC, laptop or NAS device – we had no trouble playing our multimedia test files from a USB flash drive, thanks to the player’s superb file format support. Even the less supported DivX HD, MOV and MKV wrappers worked perfectly.

The player also comes with the full version of Panasonic’s VIERA Connect online portal. It might not look quite as slick as the Smart TV services from other manufacturers, but it’s still packed with services, including BBC iPlayer, Netflix, AceTrax and YouTube, as well as social networking via Facebook and Twitter. Panasonic’s unique Skype service is also available, although to use it you’ll need to buy the optional webcam [TY-CC20W, £99 inc VAT from www.johnlewis.com).

We weren’t convinced that the new touchpad remote control is a step forward in terms of interactivity – it might make it easier to control a mouse cursor, but unless you plan on using the integrated web browser or memorising the multiple gesture inputs, we think it‘s just as easy to use regular buttons.

At roughly £280, the DMP-BDT500 is certainly expensive for a Blu-ray player, and if you don’t plan on using the analogue speaker outputs you aren’t going to get the most out of it, but it’s still a fantastic piece of kit. With all Panasonic’s network features, picture quality settings and connectivity, it’s incredibly well equipped, and both sound and video are fantastic. However, most people wouldn’t notice the difference in picture and sound quality between this and the much cheaper Panasonic DMP-BDT220. If you demand the best, it’s still a fantastic player, but there are better value systems available for anyone on a budget.