Panasonic SC-PT865W home theater system

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Features

Feature-wise, the SC-PT865W more than pulls its weight. If you've got polished floorboards or your TV sits in an open plan room, getting a surround sound system has always been problematic, as running speaker wires across the lounge in that type of situation is both unsightly and dangerous. Many early wireless HTIBs simply weren't very good, and as consumers walked away, so did the companies that offered them.

Thankfully, Panasonic's come up with a workable solution. The kit includes a small box that wirelessly receives radio frequency transmissions from the center speaker. As it needs power, we placed this transmitter behind our sofa near a power point and then connected it (with the supplied thin speaker cable) to the rear speakers located roughly on the sides of the lounge. Voila! Surround sound without cables running from the front to the back of the room. It works much better than line-of-sight-systems, where obstructions such as a dog or child standing between the speakers could cause drop outs. Although it uses the potentially crowded 2.4GHz band, we experienced no interference during our testing period.

The SC-PT865W has a nifty integrated iPod dock. While many other systems require you to hook-up (and pay extra for) an external dock if you want to play your iPod music and videos through it, in this case the dock is cleverly built-in to the DVD receiver unit. A small cover on the front flips down, and the iPod dock sits nicely on this small ledge. You can use the HTIB's on-screen display and the aforementioned remote to control the iPod's content, plus the terminal will recharge your iPod.

To play iPod video, you'll have to connect the SC-PT865W with composite cable to your TV--it will not work through HDMI. The DVD receiver also conceals a USB port, so you can also play MP3, WMA, JPEG and MPEG-4 files stored on portable USB devices. While we're talking playback formats, the DVD player itself supports DVD-video, DVD-RAM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, VCD, CD and CD-R/RW as well. Did we mention it has an AM/FM tuner as well?

On the connections front, it has HDMI out, so the player supports up-conversion of DVDs to 1080p high-definition resolution. There is also a digital optical audio input so if you're connecting to other devices like a gaming console or settop box , you can transmit surround sound signals through the 5.1 speaker system.

Finally, the HDMI connection enables what Panasonic calls Viera Link, which means that if you have a Viera TV, you can control both the TV and the HTIB through its one (cluttered) remote control.

Tags: TV, Speaker, Panasonic, flat panel, DVD player

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