Saturday, July 7, 2012

Panasonic DMP-BDT220 Integrated Wi-Fi 3D Blu-ray DVD Player Problems

The Panasonic DMP-BDT220 is a full-featured Blu-ray player that has built-in Wi-Fi. It can stream Netflix, Hulu+ and Amazon Video. It can bring 2D movies to life by converting them to 3D. All of these for a really low price. So, go ahead and buy one?
At Cautionista, we don't jump in that quickly. We did more research and found that many users of this Blu-ray player had not-so-good experiences with it. Some of their gripes were - 

  • Netflix stopped working after a firmware upgrade.
  • Unable to connect to internet after a firmware upgrade.
  • Audio-Video out of sync when streaming from Netflix or Hulu+.
  • Player freezes when attempting to connect to the internet, and to Netflix.
  • The range of Wi-Fi is limited, doesn't work reliably if the Blu-ray player is placed in a different room than the wireless router.
  • Loses Wi-Fi connection after sometime, need to unplug and plug back in to reconnect.
  • DLNA Media Server needs to be Windows7, player doesn't work with servers running on earlier versions of Windows.
  • Doesn't reliably play Mpeg-2 video files.
  • Need to reconfigure the wireless router each time to get the player to connect to Wi-Fi.
  • Firmware update doesn't work over the internet, need an SD card to be sent from Panasonic.

To Buy or Not to Buy ?


As you can see, most of the issues with the Panasonic DMP-BDT220 player are related to Wi-Fi or Streaming. This player is still a good Blu-ray player at a great price. If you are mostly into watching Netflix, Hulu+ and Amazon videos, we would recommend one of the Roku players -