Panasonic feeling Blu over first portable player

Panasonic unveiled the world’s first portable Blu-ray Disc player here at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show. Will you really see a difference on a teeny screen, compared to a portable DVD player? Yes, indeed.

Panasonic unveiled the world’s first portable Blu-ray Disc player here at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show. Will you really see a difference on a teeny screen, compared to a portable DVD player? Yes, indeed.

Available in May (but no price has been confirmed just yet), the Panasonic DMP-BD15 portable Blu-ray Disc player features a high-resolution 8.9-inch WSVGA LCD screen. It includes Internet connectivity via BD-Live and the Viera Cast streaming service for access to online content (including Amazon Video-on-Demand, YouTube and Google’s Picasa Web Albums).

Movie lovers on the go can watch flicks on the DMP-BD15, powered by a three-hour rechargeable battery, but it can also be connected to an HDTV (or AV receiver) via an HDMI cable. Have kids in the backseat? You might want to pick up the optional headrest mounting bracket for in-car use.

The BD15 also houses an SD memory card slot for video, photo and music playback. In terms of quality, Panasonic says the DMP-BD15 boasts incredibly high video performance thanks to the proprietary P4HD processing technology (“Pixel Precision Progressive Processing for HD”) that processes each pixel of the Blu-ray Disc video signal in the vertical direction, reproducing colour data with twice the accuracy of conventional systems.

To further add to the picture quality, Panasonic’s 4:4:4 signal technology also processes each pixel of the Blu-ray Disc video signal in the horizontal direction. P4HD is said to process more than 15 billion pixels per second.

Filed Under: Consumer Electronics Show > Home Entertainment > Portable Devices