Blu-ray player & recorder

Blu-ray player and Blu-ray recorder (below) — both awards go to Panasonic, which has a long and proud history in high-quality video products. It has also just launched the first 4K Blu-ray player in its home Japanese market, and with those new UHD disc players on the way, we perhaps wouldn’t recommend buying an expensive 1080p Blu-ray player right now. Hence our award goes to the DMP-BDT460, which sets you back a mere $279, yet which has proper network functions in addition to playing Blu-ray discs, DVDs and CDs, and which also supports media playback from USB and SD cards. It also has a web interface and access to Panasonic apps that add various internet functions.

One of the best things about Panasonic Blu-ray players is their superb picture quality with Australian DVDs and the few (but important e.g. ‘Pulp Fiction’) Australian Blu-ray discs running at 1080i/50. Combined with Panasonic’s usual high standards for decoding compressed video and scaling to 1080p, this player is as good as any in existence on the video front. It even upscales to 4K — but why would you want it to? Your 4K TV will knows more about its innards than a Blu-ray player, no matter how well designed. But genuinely useful is its ability to output photos at 4K, and the results are stunning. If you have a 4K TV but not a 4K compatible receiver, you can utilise the BDT460’s twin HDMI outputs, sending 4K images to your TV and audio separately to your receiver.

What the Panasonic DMP-BDT460 Blu-ray player delivered throughout our review time was classy DVD and Blu-ray performance, excellent network media support and real 4K still photo output, all at a remarkably low price.

More info: www.panasonic.com.au