List Price: $199.99
Sale Price: $114.97
Today's Bonus: 43% Off
**Upfront advice:
if you're looking for excellent disc playback and streaming performance, buy this player.
This is my fourth network streaming BD player in the past 15 months, and it's the only one that seems to do everything right.
**Positives:
Wireless streaming totally works on the BDT320. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon have not given me any problems. No rebuffers, no freezes, no disconnections. This was my single biggest complaint about the other players I tried (two Samsungs and one LG).
The player's picture quality from discs is excellent, for either Blu Ray or DVD (the DVD picture is surprisingly good, actually).
This thing is fast -faster than the other three players I had. It's fast to load, and fast to navigate. The menus are clean, polished and responsive. Even the streaming app menu responds quickly, although the Netflix app itself is rather slow.
Build quality is quite good, and the design is very attractive and unique.
**Negatives:
There's really only one, and it's minor: the remote uses a touchpad that can be tricky. I applaud the concept, because it's a great way to control the player without having to look at the remote. And it does work...sort of. It's just too inconsistent, sometimes missing gestures, and other times responding incorrectly to gestures. Also, some of the player functions are accessible only through the touchpad using onscreen menus. This means that there's no way to teach these commands to a universal remote, so accessing them will require several button presses instead of one.
All in all, the remote hasn't been an issue. I use a Harmony One universal remote, and although the code set for the BDT320 isn't yet in the Harmony online database, by using the code set from last year's Panasonic BD players I was able to get most of the functionality of the BDT320's stock remote. As I noted above, some functions are menu driven, so the remote can't learn them, but on the upside, using last year's player codes gave me buttons not available on the BDT320 remote such as Eject and discrete On and Off.
**Unknown:
I have not attempted to play burned DVD media, and I don't do network (DLNA) or hard-drive streaming (such as for DiVX files) so I can't comment on any of this.
**Bottom line:
For user-friendly, high-quality playback of discs and streamed content, this player is a winner. As an early adopter, I paid $180.00, and I definitely believe I got my money's worth.
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