Why You Can Trust CNET Panasonic DVD-RP56 review: Panasonic DVD-RP56
Panasonic DVD-RP56
- Although still awaiting his Oscar for Best Picture Reviewer, David does hold certifications from the Imaging Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology on display calibration and evaluation.
Face full of features
In addition to a display and a disc drawer, this player's black, gold, and white face has no fewer than 30 words, 14 buttons, four logos, and one big dial. The dial, a shuttle control for forward and reverse searches, would be much more useful on the remote, which is on the small side and feels a little cheap, with no glowing or backlit keys.
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Although the RP56 is currently one of the least expensive progressive-scan players on the market (with a $299 list price), its feature set is much more than skin and bones. It supports CD-R/RWs and MP3 CDs, but it can't play MP3 tracks at random or display ID3 tags onscreen. A One Touch Cinema Memory feature provides a single memory slot for the player's four principal user-adjustable modes: Virtual Surround, Bass Plus, Dialogue Enhancer, and Cinema.
Bass Plus is the most useful audio mode of the bunch, enabling you to directly connect a separate, powered subwoofer in case you don't have a multichannel amp. The back panel includes the standard composite video, S-Video, and component-video jacks (Y, Pr, Pb), as well as an optical output for digital audio, though there's no coaxial output.
Ugliness is only skin deep
Progressive-scan technology takes standard interlaced video, where the scan lines that make up a TV image are presented alternately, and turns it into progressive video so that the lines are all presented sequentially. This creates a much more stable, flicker-free image. The catch is that you need an expensive progressive-scan digital TV or HDTV to display the images. Unless you have such a set or plan on buying one, the RP56 isn't for you.
That said, those who have the right equipment should be pleased with the player's video performance. Equipped with 3:2 pull-down circuitry to clean up the output of film-based DVDs, the RP56 displays very crisp images. When we slipped in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it easily outperformed the progressive-scan circuit built into our Samsung wide-screen HDTV. There were virtually no motion artifacts visible in slow pans over the richly decorated rooms in the Yu palace. Jen's elaborate costumes were also brilliant, with well-balanced color levels.
Performance wasn't perfect, though. Slats in a window at Shu Lien's dojo jumped a little during one early shot, and a medium-speed pan caused a set of pillars to pass in subtle jerks instead of smoothly. Meanwhile, visual-noise reduction was average (we noticed, for instance, a few dancing motes in the flagstones of Peking's streets).
The RP56 lacks aspect-ratio control, so you'll have to switch to the interlaced mode when watching movies that aren't enhanced for wide screen (unless your HDTV can change ratios with progressive-scan material; many cannot). Thankfully, there's a front-panel button to switch between interlaced and progressive modes.
In interlaced mode, the component-video performance is also very good, with output levels and saturation close to progressive levels. We were disappointed, however, with the RP56's images on a standard 4:3 television; there were visible jagged edges and moving lines even with progressive scan engaged. Fortunately, high-end 4:3 TVs with a 16:9 enhanced mode (a.k.a. anamorphic squeeze) are immune to this problem.
Panasonic makes two more-expensive, single-disc progressive-scan models. The step-up DVD-RP61 includes DVD-Audio capability, and the has reference-level video performance as well DVD-Audio support. As we said, there are plenty of more attractive players out there. But if cosmetics aren't a concern and your main priority is good progressive-scan video, the RP56 is a great bargain.
