My Toshiba DVD/VCR combo finally crapped out after 5 years of solid use. Decided to buy an up-converting player since I finally bought a 1080p HDTV. Didn't want to go for Blu-Ray because I have a HUGE DVD collection. The up-converting feature with the use of an HDMI cable works BEAUTIFULLY on my TV. Films made in the 80s and 90s lose a lot of their "fuzzy" quality, which makes me really happy. My only complaint is the remote - some of the buttons are absolutely TINY. In the dark you easily press the wrong ones. Overall though, player works wonderfully, and for the price it's a STEAL! Read more
Some Plusses and some minuses on this one.On the plus side it plays a good picture. It plays both Region 1 and region 2 discs. (at least the one I got does) The counter counts down in seconds while playing. On the minus side. I have a Panasonic DMR S15 DVD recorder/player. With it you have an option of three different frequencies for the remote to choose from so you can select one that won't interfere with other panasonic equipment. I had my old DVD-S54 player which is factory set on remote 1 and set the recorder remote on 3. Worked fine. No problems with one remote trying to control the other set. The new S58 will turn on and start to play by the recorder remote regardless of whether its set on Remote 1-2or3 so I can't use it to play into the recorder. I prefer the panasonic brand but will have to go to a different manufacturers product to work with my recorder. Another minus is the poor layout of the remote control. In a darkened room its practally impossible to operate it by feel. All the remotes of the older panasonic equipment were easy to work in the dark. Read more
All in all I am very pleased with this unit. The main reason I got this one was because I had ordered a previous model Panasonic DVD player which has been superb, but is discontinued now. This one seemed like a logical successor and really, for DVD playback it's great. The upscaling looks nice (HDMI output too) and it fast to load and play and has given me no problems. My only disappointment is that it does not support DIVX (or any other VCD/Computer video formats that I can tell). I really wanted to be able to playback videos from my computer, home movies, stuff from friends, whatever. The first Panasonic unit I got plays pretty much anything I throw in it while this one is focused on factory DVDs. So, if you need a good, solid, long lasting DVD/Audio CD/MP3 player, this is the unit for you, especially for the price. If you are looking for something that supports a wide range of other codecs and formats, you will want to keep looking. Panasonic makes some that do that wonderfully, just not this one. Read more
It plays DVDs fine, and has a very nice picture on the 26" LCD TV it is attached to through HDMI. Yes, it's built very cheaply, but in this price range it is par for the course. The remote is an offense to well designed and built remotes everywhere, but again it's functional and typical for this price. Even the low end blu-ray players are succumbing to the low build quality these days, so my expectations were low, as I'm sure you can tell. The player is better than I thought it might be given the price, and the picture is great. Read more
I thought this looked like a great deal at first. However once we recieved it we noticed that after a few minutes of the DVD playing the sound went out. If you pressed pause and play again the sound would come back on. We sent it back and requested a new one. The same thing happened again. When we sent it back the charged us a restocking fee! I had to call and explain the problem and amazon eventually did refund the restocking fee but first they tried refunding it to my Amazon account instead of my credit card. I am disappointed that I had to call and bring it to their attention. There is no way they could restock and resell this product! I actually found a really great DVD player at BEST BUY for the same price. Read more
I had a problem with this player playing back DVD's I recorded on one of my own recorders. That's why I only gave it two stars and had to return it. I replaced it with a Samsung I purchased on Amazon and the Samsung works great. Read more
upon arrival device driver software wasn't up to date, causing the dvd player not to have any sound via hdmi ,,, panasonic tech didn't resolve issue,,, i figured it out on my own thru panasonics' device (s58) web page & notified panasonic to include this info in their support criteria,,, before going thru all the other steps, i recommend this solution first,,, once i installed the proper driver from here-> , the dvd player ran fine,,, be sure to copy driver to cd-r, not dvd-r & on win7, be sure to choose the cd/dvd option when burning driver to disc, NOT "use cd as flash drive" option,,, device was in good condition & arrived promptly... Read more
