The picture doesn't do it justice, it's quite a handsome machine. The DV-RP82 is the latest weapon in Panasonic's war to become a Bone Fide player in the DVD technical stakes. Currently, this is the cheapest Made in Japan DVD player offering Progressive Scan, DVD-A playback, Built in DTS and Dolby Digital Decoders using a 54MHz video chip. It plays all the usual formats including CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, MP-3, DVD-A, DVD-RAM, DVD-R and probably several I haven't even heard of yet.

    The RP82 offers the option of turning off the video processing when listening to audio discs to minimise any interference - this appears to actually work - I now have the Panasonic at home hooked up to my main system and have been playing with it for some time with results that belie it's price. Picture quality on my Panasonic 130cm Rear Projection unit, whilst not up to the standard of my reference Marantz DV-8300, is pretty bloody good and certainly would give any sub $1000 DVD's a shake up. Trying to compare the sound using DVD-Audio is not easy, by the time you've spent 5 minutes buggering around changing all the RCA leads on the back, it's hard to quantify the differences between machines. All I can tell you is that it sounds excellent to my aging ears. CD Playback is easier to compare, and again, whilst not as smooth as the Marantz (at three times the price) it would compare more than favourably with most $400 to $600 dedicated CD Players (that should really piss off the purists).

    Operation is intuitive (I'm generally too lazy to read the manuals) and fortunately we've figured out how to multizone them (free service, courtesy of Alex). The DV-RP82 is the successor to the highly regarded Panasonic DV-R61 which was a bargain at $849. At $649 that makes the DV-RP82 an absolute steal!