Panasonic DVD-S54K 1080p Upconverting DVD Player

I've tried several upscaling DVD players and this is the best picture I've seen so far. The player itself is very reliable and I've had no problems after several months of use. Panasonic is one of my favorite products and I find them to be very dependable.

Hey, I got this DVD player about a month ago on the recommendation of AMB Media Services and it was well worth the cost. This player was recommended to us after our latest crappy cheapo DVD player started acting up. I just had to clear off the space on my teeny tiny TV cabinet so that this long, flat machine can hog all of the cabinet top space, but so far, I think it's TOTALLY worth it to get a DVD player that works all the time, everytime, and I'll never go cheapo again!

I'm a technological semi-geek. I can get most things to work. But so far, this machine is not as easy to use as I thought it would be. It plays store bought DVDs, mp3s and audio CDs well. The upconverting creates a modestly better picture with its HDMI out than my ancient former DVD player (10 years old) did when I played it through its S-Video out. The Viera link works with my Panasonic TV, which as far as I can tell only means the TV turns on when the DVD player goes on; whether you can consider that a plus is debatable, but you can easily turn the link off.

What I have yet to get to work are mpeg-4 files from either DVD discs or CD discs. The machine says it can't read the discs. I'll keep tweaking. But it looks like that on paper the previous generation DVD player from Panasonic, the S53K, actually had a little more versatility with regard to disc formats.

I own a DMR-ES25 Panasonic recorder and wanted a player with DVD-RAM capabilities. However when I hooked this up to my 1080p LCD TV through HDMI, I noticed that the resulting picture was noisy and much worse than the 1080i upconversion coming from my old Panasonic's HDMI output. There was practically no noticeable difference between the 480p and 1080p outputs when watching DVDs. It was as if there was no upconversion. I even experienced occasional video and audio loss. BTW I was using the same HDMI cable to compare my DVD recorder and this unit, so I don't think that was the issue here. The menu screen had superfluous white dots in random places.

Also the tray is flimsy and it's hard to get DVDs out. I ended up returning it. I either got a bad unit or the quality of the upconversion circuitry is just not up to par compared to older generation Panasonics.

great picture quality, so far watched 2 movies and they looked incredible. much clearer then a reg DVD player@ 480i. the only fault that I see is the tray is a little flimsy. I would recommend this DVD player.