Panasonic DVD-S53 DVD Player Review

Installation

We installed Panasonic DVD-S53 to a 47” 1080p HDTV set from LG (47LC7DF) and to a Sony STR-DG510 5.1 receiver.

As we mentioned briefly, this unit sends audio signal through the HDMI connector, which is really convenient if you receiver has an embedded video switcher, as you will need just one cable for connecting the player to your home theater system. This video switcher feature, present on several home theater receivers, allows you to simultaneously switch your audio and video by the press of a button. For example, when you press “DVD” on the receiver, it will automatically play the audio being sent by your DVD player and send the DVD video signal to your TV, at the same time. By selecting “Video 2,” for instance, it will switch both audio and video to whatever equipment is connected to that input (your cable decoder, for example). On receivers without this feature you can only select the audio input, not the video, so you have to switch the audio input on the receiver and the video input on your TV.

If you don’t have a receiver with a video switcher then you will need an extra audio cable, since you will need to connect the player to your TV using a HDMI cable and then use an audio cable to connect the player to the receiver. Since this player has only coaxial SPDIF, this is your only option (another option would be using the two analog audio outputs, but they should only be used if you don’t have a home theater receiver). Here the same tip we gave last page about cables is valid. Buy online; it’s cheaper. SPDIF coaxial cable is also called RCA mono cable.

Our problem here, however, wasn’t with the player but with our receiver. Even though Sony STR-DG510 has a video switcher, it is not capable of extracting audio from the HDMI inputs (which is a shame, by the way), so the audio was routed to the TV instead of being played on the receiver. Since our TV was with its audio outputs disabled – as it is the normal procedure if you have a home theater receiver – we couldn’t hear anything S53 was playing. The solution was to connect a digital audio cable from the player to the receiver – one extra cable and one extra cost. One again, this was a limitation of our receiver and had nothing to do with the player itself.

As we mentioned, this unit doesn’t come with the cables you’ll need. If your receiver has an embedded video switcher you will need to buy two HDMI cables, one to connect your player to your receiver and another to connect your receiver to your TV – plus a coaxial SPDIF audio cable (RCA mono cable) if your receiver, like ours, is incapable of extracting audio from the HDMI connector or if your TV doesn’t have a HDMI input. If your receiver doesn’t have a video switcher, then you will need to buy one HDMI cable to connect your player to your TV and one audio cable (coaxial SPDIF) to connect your player to your receiver.

From what we’ve been seen on the market, the most common HDMI cable lengths are 3 feet, 6 feet and 12 feet. We tried them all and three feet proved to be too short to connect the player to the TV, but if you are using a receiver with an embedded video switcher and you will place the player on top of it, this length is adequate. To connect your player or receiver to your TV you will need a 6-feet cable if the player or receiver is right below or right above your TV. If they are more distant than that, then you need to buy a 12-feet cable.

Once again, buy these cables on-line at stores like Newegg.com: it makes no sense paying USD 40 or more on a HDMI cable when they cost less than half of this on-line.

After the physical installation it is time to tu
rn on the player for the first time. This player is really fast to come to life and its tray opens really fast.

The biggest problem we found is that this DVD player doesn’t have an “auto” option to try to detect the maximum resolution of your TV to automatically configure its internal upscaler. Not only that, the option to configure the upscaler is hidden and unless you read the manual you won’t find it (and even the manual isn’t so clear about this). This is really a problem, as many people will buy this DVD player, connect it to his or her TV and think they are already using the maximum resolution the player can provide (and get a lousy image quality), while in fact the player will be working at 480i (SDTV). This is really bad.

In order to configure the resolution you will need to hit the “Function” key four times and change the resolution under “Video Format.”

The remote control has a convenient “setup” key where you can configure almost everything about your player – but the output resolution. This is really stupid; the resolution configuration should be there.

Not only that. When you turn on this player for the first time it shows you a “quick setup” option like many players on the market, but this quick setup doesn’t configure the output resolution!

After fixing this you should hit the setup key and check the audio and video configuration. Video should be configured as “4:3 Letterbox” if you are using a CRT-based TV or as “16:9 Normal” if you are using a widescreen TV. Make sure to configure “PCM output” as “Up to 96 kHz.” If your home theater receiver has Dolby Digital decoder (which is the most probable scenario) you should configure “Dolby Digital” as “Bitstream.” The same thing should be done with “DTS” if your home theater has a DTS decoder.

After this initial setup we had the basic audio and video configurations corrected and we were ready to watch movies using all the power from Panasonic S53.