For a definition of the word 'tedious' though, my advice is to visit Sony's BD Live content portal...

I had no problems actually getting the player online via BD Live; once connected to my wired network
the player automatically configured itself and was ready to connect.

But it quickly became apparent that the BD Live experience needs a lot more refinement.

BD Live woes

Sony's debut BD Live release is Men in Black. The disc is rather good, with lots of additional material,
a great transfer of the film and a stunning Dolby TrueHD soundtrack. The BD Live aspect on the other hand is a big disappointment.

Having established a connection, you need to insert an SD memory card into the player to store downloaded content. The card isn't supplied and it won't work without one.

When you do get to the online area you have the privilege of downloading movie clips and filling in customer feedback forms. I spent ages downloading an HD video clip of Hancock and almost as long trying to play it from the SD card.

Interactive games

Another attraction turns out to be an interactive game where you answer movie trivia questions, if you have the patience to type them in using the remote control.

It certainly looks like a colossal waste of time in its current form, but there's no denying the potential of BD Live. Such functionality, though, seems to be designed to appeal to an undemanding younger audience.

As an adult attraction it's clearly not ready for primetime.

Vivid hi-def pictures

As a home theatre playback device, the DMP-BD50 is outstanding. This Panasonic makes good use of image processing technology to improve already impressive 1080p24 video.

The result is a bold and focused picture that can only really be appreciated when blown up on a superlarge screen (I used it with an InFocus IN81).

The Men in Black BD looked superb, with natural skin tones and very vivid CGI images. MiB is full of dark material, including Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith's suits, of course, and this proved a good test of the BD50's handling of subtle contrast and shadow detail.

On DVD you typically can't make out the lines of their lapels against the black jackets, but on Blu-ray you certainly can. Shadowed areas are remarkably well-resolved throughout the film.

Ambient surround sound

Run Fatboy Run is a much lighter film altogether, but looks equally fabulous on the BD50. Nike will certainly be pleased with the sharpness of it's oh-so-unsubtle branding.

The Fatboy Blu-ray release is blessed with a DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 mix, which sounded superb through my 7.1 reference system.

Assuming you have a fairly recent receiver with HDMI v1.3 inputs, you'll be able to appreciate the extended mix and huge dynamic range of the hi-res audio track.

It gives the crowd scenes a truly cohesive ambience with the additional speakers in attendance.

Strong CD performance

In our Tech Labs, while it failed BD 'jaggies' (just) and DVD 'text crawl' (vertical) tests the player was deemed to deliver excellent detail.

There is no resolution loss on either the film or video test sequences on the Silicon Optix HQV BD test disc. And while there is some noise in its video signal (no noise reduction is applied by the player) it is visibly less garrulous than rivals.

The BD50 supports neither Super Audio CD or DVD-Audio platters, but it does make a good fist of playing regular CDs. The player offers relatively low levels of audio jitter, and that means a good, clean signal from all of the multichannel analogue outputs.