Awesome picture and sound quality!

The remote truly sucks! Buttons are way too small and placed, in my opionion, in the wrong places of the remote.

I have had the Panasonic for a few days now, and I am truly blown away from the picture quality and sound quality. Popped in a copy of Apollo 13 and was amazed. This is my first DVD player, so I don't know too much about them. All I know is that I will never buy another movie on VHS! Once you go DVD, you never go back! The Panasonic DVD A-120 is a great player for someone looking to get started. Simply superb!

Similar Products Used:

None

It's cheap and has performed flawlessly.

Remote is so-so

After about 6 months and maybe 4 dozen DVDs (mostly rentals), I haven't encountered any annoying glitches. No lip-sync errors or pixellation problems. A lighted, better-designed remote would be nice, but whatever. I have it hooked up to a 50" Hitachi rear-proj. television, and some Energy speakers. The Panasonic is a superb value.

Crisp, sharp picture. Excellent sound quality. All types of output.

not find yet

Great picture and sound quality. The sound is even clearer than my LD player when playing CD. Perhaps the Toslink makes the difference. Input, output and remote are fine. No sync problem. I do not consider this model as a starter or budgeted model. Other players are more expensive because they come with a built-in DD decoder but you will not get better sound and picture. The extra investment on the built in decoder should be invested on upgrading the receiver.

Similar Products Used:

Pioneer LD player

Very good timewise response, ability to decode 5.1 channels, facilitates post processing of audio channels

none

I have made use of this dvd player for my audio signal processing project. Through the use of this dvd player that I could rely on latency time estimates of my post processing of the 5.1 audio channels. Overall picture quality and user interface through the remote were some of the important strengths of the product for my special application.

Good Picture Quality, Good Audio Quality

None

Good DVD Player at a affordable price. Place both CD and DVDs well.

Passes PLUGE blacker than black, terrific picture, price is a real value

I wish the remote was backlit

I agree with most of the comments posted here. Just a couple of things to add... unlike some units (ie Toshiba), the A120 passes the "blacker-than-black" signal that is used with the Video Essentials and Avia DVD's to optimize monitor settings.

Also, apparently the A120 is soon to be discontinued. I've seen it onsale locally (NYC area) for as little as $199. To my mind, at this price the A120 is the best value out there in DVD players

Component Video, 2 Sets of Outputs, Optical & Coaxial Digital Output.

Pixels!

Overall, a very nice machine. Just a little annoyed about the high amount of pixelation! Also, suffers from the "jaggies" a little more than I would have expected. My RCA 5220P still has the best picture of any "low end" DVD Player I have used.

This player DOES not give the weird "venitian blind" effect when playing VCD's, unlike the GE, Samsung and Konka Player.

Overall, I am very pleased. But what can I expect for $169?

Similar Products Used:

Samsung 709, RCA 5220P, Konka 1800U, GE 1105P

Picture quality; component video output; 24/96 DAC for DVD audio output

inferior CD sound with analog output

I used it mainly for watching movies with my Hitachi 53SBX59B. The color can be improved by using the Y/C/B component connection (with Moster Cable Super 3 component cable). One example is the night scene in Chap 26 of "Mulan," for which the beautiful yelllow and green color was not there with a MC Super 3 (coaxial) composite cable. On the other hand, the higher line resolution of the Y/C/B connection seems not have as much impact on the picture quality of these scenes as the color separation. Although I didn't make a direct comparison with S-video in this regard, my DSS installer, who has a full scale home theater (thanks to the recent increasing DSS subscriptions) was very impressed by the picture quality with only the composite connection and suggested to stay with it for some time. For the sound, I was limited to two full range speakers (Infinity P-FR) and the analog output. But even this nonoptimal sound is already very good, distiguished from the typical CD sound with wider dynamic range and richer liveliness. The analog output seems not lacking the bass and LFE-- I can feel it when playing the movies "True Lies" and "Saving Private Ryan". In DVD audio with 24/96 conversion (chesky), the music is very nice and enjoyabl, better than any of my CDs.

I had tried to use the A-120 as a substitute CD player, but was disappointed by the obviously inferior sound, at least, from the analog output. What annoyed me most is the incoherence of the sound coming from different instruments/players: they are too often noticeably out of time, making the listening unenjoyable. Yesterday, I compared this DVD player with a HK FL-8550 CD player which employs an HDCD decoder. The difference in sound is significant: The incoherence once heard from playing CD in analog with the A-120 totally disappeared.

Four (4) stars for performance and five (5) stars for value.

Similar Products Used:

none

Performance, Videophile features

Remote, software/hardware bugs, lightweight- construction nothing to write home about. Considering price point though this is a nitpick

I have had this player since October 1999 and have never once regreted purchasing it- especially considering the price I paid for it.

The A120's previous buyer returned it but somehow forgot its box and manual, and as a result Best Buy was especially generous with their rebate (for those who don't know, BB is the absolute best place to purchase returned, marked down, merchandise- as long as you don't mind taking the chance. We havepurchased a $150.00 garbage disposal for $60.00, an $80.00 attic antenna for $50.00 and my 299.99 dollar DVD player for 168.00).

Anyway, the A120 has performed admirably over the course of it's life; playing back ever single DVD I have either rented or have in my collection (which is at around 70 DVDs)- including some notoriously problematic titles like the Matrix and American Beauty (Awards DTS edition). I also now use it for CD playback and find it performs very well as a transport (my HK 510 suppies the D/A conversion with it's stellar 192/24 chip). I also love the fact the unit has Component out and black level adjustment.

The only issues I've had with the machine has been the remote, which now thinks it's navigatioon arrows are "selection" and a bug in it's transport or decoding that has a hard time playing back scene-selected DVD's after CD playback. In a couple of cases I had been playing back a CD and then, without powering down, loaded a DVD and cued to a scene, only to have the scene break-up in a fit of pixelation and audio drop-outs. Both DVD's, "The X-FIles Fight the Future" (in DTS)and the Hunt for Red October (in Dolby Digital, had played back perfectly on a number of other occasions, so I decided to "reboot" the A120, without removing the problemed DVD, and see if the same problem occured. After the reboot I cued to the same scene and all was well- in the case of both DVDs. I was able to reproduce the problem easily, but clear it up once the A120 was rebooted.

My intial impression is that the A120 may have a problem with it's ability to detect media format changes. The fact that the DVD worked fine after a restart seems to point to such a bug. At any rate though, I don't see it as being a catastrophic problem since there's a work-around and all newer software-driven electonics have bugs- as long as they don't take away from the functionality of the unit I can't complain for the money I paid for it.

Now if I had paid $1000.00...then maybe such a bug would be beyond acceptable...

Before I conclude my review I wanted to point out a couple of clarifications in respect to some posts I've seen on this and other DVD players.
For those of you who want to record DVD's to a Video tape, or connect your player through you VCR...The copy-protection encoded into your DVD video will kick in if you pass the signal out of the DVD player through a VCR. That maybe why some of you are experiencing a bad picture when you hook the DVD player to your VCR. It's not the fault of the player it's the nature of the copy-protection, so listin it as a weakness of the player is kinda unfair. The same behavior exists for those who have tried to copy Macrovision-encoded Video tapes. The only device I know of that perform this task are those products from "Go-Video" (they may have changed their name).
Also, for those who are haivng problems playing back DTS, you may want to make sure that the machine's menu is set-up to read the DTS Bitstream in the "Action Menu".
I know that these last two points maybe ridiculously obvious, but given some of the posts on this site I figure that stating the obvious once may assist those who choose to blame devices for what may not be their fault.

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Toshiba, Panasonic RV30

Could Someone List the tech specs for this Item! I can't find them anywhere!
I give this a 3 star rating because I know nothng about it!