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Panasonic had a stand- out 2008 on the Blu-ray front, with the Panasonic DMP-BD35 earning the first Editor’s Choice award for a standalone Blu-ray player. After learning most of the basic Blu- ray functions, like BD- live and high resolution audio decoding, it looks like the two latest players, the Panasonic DMP-BD60 and Panasonic DMP-BD80, are mostly incremental updates to the current Blu- ray players. 

Both sets have maintained everything we favored about last year’s model, including Profile 2. support, fantastic video quality, and onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS- HD Master Audio Important. The significant supplement to the recent unit is VieraCast, which is Panasonic’s proprietary online content portal that presently provides YouTube, Picasa, weather, and stock quotes, with Amazon Video On Demand coming in May. VieraCast is a nice addition, on the other hand unfortunately it’s not enough to keep up with the significant leaps the competition has made, adding includes like Wi- Fi connectivity, Netflix streaming, and onboard memory to its new 2009 Blu-ray players. 

The Panasonic DMP-BD60’s strength is its rock- solid performance, but if you’re searching for the latest and greatest includes you’ll should look elsewhere. 

Finally, it is worthy to note the key step- up highlight of the Panasonic DMP- BD80 is the 7. 1 analog audio outputs. 

You will also discover these players support DTS- HD Master Audio Imperative, and not standard DTS- HD Master Audio. This latest form of the DTS- HD audio codec is mostly the same, but it drops support for some of the more advanced DVD audio formats, such as DTS 96/24, DTS ES, ES Matrix, and DTS NEO 6. However, if a DVD has one of those soundtracks, you will not be left without sound, as it will just go back to standard DTS audio. It also loses support for DTS- ES Matrix and NEO 6 on Blu- ray, however those soundtracks are hard to find on Blu- ray movies. 

Consider us spoiled, nevertheless even with Viera Cast and Amazon Video On- Demand support, it is disappointing that these players don’t have support for Netflix Instant Streaming, which is fairly quickly becoming the most popular value- added feature for Blu- ray. We also had our hopes set on Panasonic including Wi- Fi on these next- generation players as very few people have Ethernet connections in their living rooms.