Custom Search
Location:  Main Index » Forum Index » Tech Reviews
Advertisement
Advertisement
Recent Topics
Tech Reviews
 
Panasonic DVD-S35 Progressive Scan DVD Player

Manufacturer:

By Mike Rollett
SPot Senior Editor

Model number: 

2003-03-29 - " The Panasonic DVD-S35 DVD player is Panasonic’s first salvo in the Japanese company’s avowed effort to regain the low-priced DVD market from Chinese imports. Offering progressive scanning, incremental zooming and playback of a wide variety of media at an MSRP of $99.95, the S35 is positioned to do exactly that. "

Review:

Normally, you would not expect videophile performance at this price level, but Panasonic has spoiled customers in the sub-$200 price range with previous models that incorporated their excellent MPEG decoders and Sage/Faroudja (now Genesis) deinterlacing. Unfortunately, the Sage chip was one of the early casualties of the new lower pricing. The S35 is driven by Panasonic’s new all-in-one chip solution, which handles MPEG decoding, deinterlacing and, in the upcoming DVD-A version (DVD-S55), DVD-A processing as well.

The player is available in either silver or black, which is a welcome change to Panasonic’s recent trend of chrome and silver. Build quality is pretty good for a player in this price range. It has a metal case and the usual plastic front panel. It’s lightweight, but still seems better constructed than other sub-$100 players I’ve seen. The disc tray has a pretty smooth motion, but although disc loading and chapter access are a little noisy, the unit is silent during regular playback. Following the trend of Panasonic’s recent players, the only digital output is an optical one.

Okay, enough about the box itself. Let’s get into the important stuff. How is the video playback? Well, it won’t make anyone trade in their RP-82, XP-30 or 50, but during normal viewing, it’s not bad. Let’s take a look.

Video

DVD Viewing



Rather than be influenced at first impression by test patterns, I put Avia in the S35 just long enough to make the proper picture setting adjustments (color, white and black level in particular), then popped in a few DVDs I’m very familiar with as well as some of the well known “test” DVDs (Monsters Inc., Toy Story, Super Speedway and Moulin Rouge to name a few). Viewing was on a Mitsubishi WS-55807 that’s been calibrated (and recently tuned-up) by CraigM, using 6’ AR Master Series component cables.

So, how does it look? Most of the time, pretty darn good. I did some side-by-side comparisons with some other players (Panasonic RP-82, JVC XV-S60 and, just for fun, an old $1000 Toshiba interlaced SD-9000). In general, I would say that the S35 was most equal to the JVC, since its weakness was when it dropped into Video mode, much like the JVC. While in Film mode, and without much motion in the picture, the S35 was hard to distinguish from the RP-82. However, the RP-82’s advantage is that consistently presents a great picture whether in Film or Video mode. Also, as will be touched upon in the test section, the S35 does not have motion-adaptive deinterlacing, making for some noticeable jaggies in diagonal edges of action sequences. On the plus side, consistent with other recent Panasonic DVD players, the S35 does not have the chroma bug, but it does have blocky chroma upsampling. To quote Don Munsil from one of his previous posts: “Panasonic uses what looks like maybe a 2-tap filter to do chroma upsampling, which produces relatively strong and visible stairstepping on strong chroma contours (like the microphone in chapter 4 of Toy Story).” This was noticeable on the S35 where it was not on the RP-82. However, to be fair, it was not objectionable, particularly at normal viewing distances. In any event, just to demonstrate how far these players have come, the S35 always looked better than the Toshiba that was the top-of-the-line just a few years ago.

This player’s best feature however, is the incremental zooming ability. With a non-anamorphic, letterboxed DVD (or if you just can’t stand black bars on any DVD), you can zoom in 0.01X increments. The degradation in picture quality is fairly minimal and would probably be even less so on a 4:3 direct view TV.

The player’s layer changes are about average. They average around 1-1.5 seconds depending on the disk.

Test Discs



Running the player through the Avia test patterns was a mixed bag. While the vertical lines in the 6.75 MHz circle resolution test were sharp and well defined, there was some moiré and flickering in the high frequencies of the vertical and horizontal resolution wedges that I haven’t seen on other players. This flickering did not reveal itself in normal viewing however. Y/C delay appeared acceptable, with no real smearing of the transition between the yellow and red bars.

Moving to the Faroudja test disk, the S35 had its problems with the pendulum/OK pattern. The “OK” flickered wildly and the pendulum had a jagged edge as it moved back and forth. The same jagged edge was visible in the flag waving sequence as well, proving the S35’s lack of motion adaptive deinterlacing.

The S35 had its problems with the WQHL Mixed Mode pattern as well. The transitions to video were not very clean, with some combing. Also, the flickering seen with the Avia resolution patterns was seen here as well.

Audio



DVDs and CDs output through the digital outputs sound the same as they do with most DVD players in the lower price range, since the receiver’s doing the digital-to-analog conversion. I find that DVD players in this price range sound pretty much the same when using the digital outputs to pass DD or DTS. I don’t think anyone would buy this player for it’s audio capabilities anyway.

Conclusion



It wasn’t too long ago that you’d have to pay $600 or more to get a progressive scan DVD player that didn’t have any better deinterlacing than the S35 does. But the bar’s been raised recently, particularly by Panasonic themselves. Coming on the heels of their string of low-priced Faroudja-equipped players, the S35 is somewhat of a disappointment. However, it is a pretty good player for $99 and its zooming abilities will appeal to many. I would expect it would show very well on a direct view 4:3 TV where some of its deinterlacing artifacts would not be noticeable. Overall, I give it 3 paws.

Features:
Rating:

Overall:

Advertisement

Location:  Main Index » Forum Index » Tech Reviews

Top of Page ^

(C)opyright 2000 - 2010 - All Rights Reserved. No information may be posted elsewhere without written permission.
Any company or tradenames, trademarks and alike are used for review purposes only and are the property of their respective owners.
FusionBB™ Version 2.3 | ©2003-2007 InteractivePHP, Inc.
Execution time: 0.068 seconds.   Total Queries: 18   Zlib Compression is on.
All times are (GMT -0800) Pacific. Current time is 11:57 PM
Top