Panasonic's DMP-B15 portable Blu-ray player: $800, ships this month
By Darren Murph 
posted Jun 1st 2009 10:01AM
posted Jun 1st 2009 10:01AM
posted Jun 1st 2009 10:01AM
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$800 to quiet the kids on the road.
You've clearly never had an eight hour trip with the little buggers, have you?
No kids yet, but I've got the ol' backhand ready to go.
Kevin, you better think twice if you are serious about 8 hrs road trip. This thing would last you 2 hrs max (I know 2.5 hrs was an optimistic figure).
Spare batteries, extra wall adapters, airplane adapters, and auto adapters (if you don't have a converter in your car) for the win.
Or just do yourself a fav and buy this instead
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834117873
@DR House
LOL... that really highlights how pointless this thing is. Spend roughly 13% more and you have a laptop that not only plays BDs on a bigger, higher resolution screen, it also has all the utility of a laptop.
$800 on a portable Blu Ray player or $5 on some duct tape. Tough choice...
WSVGA... for all your Blu-Ray watching needs
WTF is the point of high-definition films on such a small WSVGA screen? And who's gonna buy an $800 portable Blu-Ray player?
HDMI out. Perfect for trips, way easier than lugging a whole deck to your vacation home.
Yeah true, but if you have a whole bunch of Blurays that you use at home with your HDTV, and then you decide you want to watch them on the go, what else are you going to use to watch them?
"And who's gonna buy an $800 portable Blu-Ray player?"
Fan boys and Japanese doctors, I guess. Pretty ridiculous, for sure.
For $100 or $200 more, you can get a brand new laptop with blu-ray and hdmi.
excuse my ignorance but surely the whole point of blue ray is the high definition
on a screen that size i doubt your going to see the difference in quality, plus if its to keep the kids quiet there not going to car if its HD or not. and for the price of this you can get a pmp or portable dvd even, with enough media for a trip round the world!!!!
i but car instead of care!!! doh
In the long run you're going to spend less by getting this player than by spending $200 on a portable DVD player and then rebuying all your Blu-rays on that format just to take them on the road.
You're right that it would be pretty stupid to buy this thing as your first Blu-ray player and then start buying Blu-ray movies just to watch on this screen exclusively, but I think the idea here is that we've all got Blu-ray collections at home that aren't exactly portable yet.
I don't see the point. On a screen that small...you're really wasting the tech and the cash. Especially if it's for children...I've never met a kid who cared about HD.
I'd stick with standard dvd for that one.
If you already have Bluray discs, then you might find this useful. A DVD player can't play the Blurays you may already have. Though if you didn't mind having two copies of each movie (Bluray for home, DVD for the road), I'm sure a portable DVD player and all the movies you could ever want would cost less than this.
I got my seven year old a 42 Inch 1080p LCD tv for her birthday last year, and a blu-ray player for Christmas, she definitely appreciates the quality difference, she now dreads watching tv at her grandma's house, she says its fuzzy.
Wow Eric H...
I feel sorry for the poor guy who ends up with that one in another 11+ years... Gold digger in the making...
Wow bethel03, what a douche. There is a big difference between liking HD and wanting gold. I hope someone hits you with a car.
lol I love you guys *wipes tear away*
lol what sort of kid would dread watching any sort of tv???
The old saying applies, "if you have more money than brains"
I thought children would prefer PSP instead...
you can get a 17" bluray reader laptop for that price with 1440x900 res with hdmi out. Ridiculous price for that piece of crap!
yep
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834147918
So Sam,
How do you mount tha 17" BD-playing laptop to the back of the headrest for the rugrats in the back seat to watch on roadtrips? Or is the centre console in your vehicle wide enough for it to fit?
S
Just bring a laptop. There you go.
Shut up.....
Love,
-Panasonic
if it had pico projector and a smaller screen than it mite be worth it...
but still blue ray's still a big optical(fragile) format to carry around.
That's just pure waste of 50GB and 1080p video.
Why don't they just put the blueray right on 46" or 50" screen.... not so portable is it?
If your kid is enough of a tech snob to notice the difference between SD and HD on a screen that small, you've got problems, bub.
That "oh but you'll never see the difference on such a small screen" rubbish is irrelevant. If blu-ray is going to be the de facto standard for home video as DVD was, you need to have these kinds of players. People aren't going to buy a DVD disc along with their blu-rays, they're gonna need a portable system to play them, even without the benefit of 1080p.
That said,
1- I believe you can definitely see the difference if the screen is good quality, not this interlaced flickering garbage they sell with portable DVD players.
2- I don't believe blu-ray is gonna be "the new DVD" in the way that DVD was "the new VHS". The way we consume media has changed dramatically.
This may be just me but isn't the attraction of blu-ray supposed to be great resolution on huge screens? At 62 my eyes struggle to watch movies on my ipod, but not because the resolution is poor. In fact it is terrific because of the small screen size (And mine is a lo-rez classic). If my grandchildren are typical, they can be entertained with a blurry cartoon movie which they have already seen four times before.
800 bucks is far too much, I have a 17" laptop that I got 3 years ago, and the Nvidia video card can decode Blu-ray, for 65 bucks new off of ebay this baby can play Blu-rays like a champ, and a $5 dvi to hdmi cable will add any hdmi connectivity I need.
Even HDCP?
you cant tell the difference between bluray and dvd on a 9 inch screen. Most kid movies are coming bundled with Bluray/digitalcopy/regular DVD in one package so you cant argue about having to buy it twice. That being the case go to costco and buy the $90 portable dvd player thingy call it a day
There is a use for this thing, and I suspect it is best as a portable Blu-Ray player to take to vacations and such. That screen is worthless. I would appreciate some 1080p pixel density on it, but honestly I know it doesn't matter unless you hold the screen 4" from your face. Might as well make a screenless discman type player with HDMI out.
I guess you need that if your kids are spoiled enough that they can't survive car trips on DVD alone. When I was a kid, I was jealous of the Mark III conversion van these friends of ours had. It sported a fancy CRT and VCR built into a roof that had to be raised 10 inches to fit it.