Panasonic DMP-BD65 Blu-ray player review

Pitch perfect pictures make this a Blu-ray player to savour

Panasonic DMP-BD65 Blu-ray player
The DMP-BD65 is the stripped down version of the DMP-BD85

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Panasonic dbp-bd65 remote

We'll come on to the DMP-BD65's silky pictures in a moment, but it's worth first considering the sheer speed of its loading of Blu-ray discs.

In further proof that Panasonic has concentrated on hi-def disc handling to the exclusion of almost all other facets, in our tests the DMP-BD65 was playing a Blu-ray disc in 12-17 seconds after being switched on. If the machine is already on, it takes only five seconds after closing the tray.

Super-speedy

To achieve this, the player must be in Quick Load mode – and is consuming more power while in standby mode (you can hear it audibly hum). That Quick Load mode can be switched-off in the player's on-screen menus; it then takes around 21 seconds to load discs.

Oddly, the Viera Cast interface now includes a central icon for Blu-ray – presumably to mask the lack of actual extra content – but if you select the icon with the remote, it simply takes you to a screensaver, and doesn't automatically play the disc, as we'd hoped.

The DMP-BD65, however, is worth its quirks. Hurt Locker on Blu-ray is studded with delicate scenes of the bright desert surroundings, with contrast-heavy murkier passages receiving almost as much fine detail. That the machine's PHL Reference Chroma Processor Plus is working overtime is confirmed by the realistic though vivid and clean colours with no hint of banding or picture noise.

There are plenty of deep blacks present in night scenes, with impressive detail in shadowed areas of the image and excellent contrast during scenes featuring night time explosions.

Excellent detail

Better still, close-ups have as much detail as we've seen on any Blu-ray player, while fast motion doesn't present the DMP-BD65 with any major problems, though there's a bit more work for Panasonic's engineers to accomplish here.

Overall it's a great performance with Blu-ray, and crucially it carries on the good work with DVD. A disc of Star Trek scrubs up well, with the slightly softer picture otherwise almost as involving as Blu-ray. Motion is handled well and edges keep their continuity; what's not to like?

Jamie Carter

Jamie is a freelance tech, travel and space journalist based in the UK. He’s been writing regularly for Techradar since it was launched in 2008 and also writes regularly for Forbes, The Telegraph, the South China Morning Post, Sky & Telescope and the Sky At Night magazine as well as other Future titles T3, Digital Camera World, All About Space and Space.com. He also edits two of his own websites, TravGear.com and WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com that reflect his obsession with travel gear and solar eclipse travel. He is the author of A Stargazing Program For Beginners (Springer, 2015),