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Panasonic have announced DVD-Audio and DVD-R/RAM support as part of their forthcoming flagship home theater system, to be released in September priced at $1,000.
Jim Kiczek, national marketing manager, Panasonic Home Audio Division: “Panasonic’s newest 5.1 channel home theater system not only plays back the most popular audio and video formats, DVD-Audio and DVD-Video discs and CDs, but it also records TV programs and dubs recordings from a video camera onto DVD-R or DVD-RAM discs with optimum results. In short, the SC-HT1000 is the next step in home theater.”
From Panasonic:
At the heart of the new system is its DVD-RAM/R recorder, the same engine that drives the company’s newly announced DMR-E100H DVD Recorder. With the new system, consumers can record their favorite television programs or self-recorded videos to either DVD-RAM or DVD-R discs.
The new system’s DVD recorder lets users view a program recorded onto a DVD-RAM disc while simultaneously recording a different program. With Chasing Playback, users can also view the recorded portion of a live program, from the beginning, while continuing to record that program until its completion. The Time Slipä feature also allows viewers to replay a scene recorded 30 seconds earlier without disrupting the recording process, simply by touching a button on the remote.
Thumbnail display of contents is also possible for recording to a DVD-RAM or DVD-R disc. Since each scene is displayed with a thumbnail image, it’s easy for users to select the sequence of scenes they want to play back.
“With the huge storage capacity, ease-of-use, and long lifetime of the media, more consumers are realizing the advantages of DVD recording,” says Kiczek. “No more recording over previous shows by mistake, and with the touch of a single button, the user can easily – and nearly instantly – play back their last recorded program without the need of searching for the beginning.”
This new home theater system has a sleek and slim main unit with two Tall-Boy front speakers, each on an adjustable stand for layout flexibility. By raising or lowering the stands to match the speakers’ height with the TV screen, the user can experience optimal theater sound performance. And their stylish design looks ideal with plasma and large-screen TVs.
The OmniCast™ Surround Speakers create a wider listening area with realistic acoustic performance similar to a movie theater. The tweeter and woofer in the OmniCast speakers are positioned upwards in the cabinet with a diffusion board directly in front of the tweeter to achieve the necessary reflection and dispersion of sound in a broad and uniform way.
In addition, the speaker system has a compact center speaker with a two-way, two-speaker, bass-reflex configuration and a powerful subwoofer with a built-in 240W power amplifier. The front, center, and surround speakers are able to reproduce frequencies reaching up to 50kHz, and the subwoofer has a frequency range from 45Hz to 120Hz.
The new SC-HT1000 outranks conventional systems with its easy setup and connection capabilities. With a single cable, the main unit connects to the subwoofer; the additional five speakers simply attach to the subwoofer delivering a total output power of 700W. [Total Output Power: 700W rated at 1 kHz (1 kHz, 6 ohms, 10% THD)/430W (120Hz-20kHz, 6 ohms/1% THD)]
The home theater receiver is comprised of a built-in DTS and Dolby Digital decoder, Dolby Surround Pro Logic II, quartz synthesized digital AM/FM tuning system, and a universal remote control that is compatible with many TV/VCR brands. The DVD video recorder can play discs in DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-Audio, DVD-Video, CD-Audio, Video CD, and CD-R/RW formats. It is able to record discs in DVD-RAM and DVD-R formats using XP, SP, LP, and EP recording modes, which range respectively with recording times of one, two, four and six hours.
Other DVD features include a dialogue enhancer, picture mode – cinema, fine, soft, normal, and user settings – and picture controls for brightness, contrast, sharpness, gamma correction, and color. In addition, it is a progressive scan player, which doubles the scan lines of an interlaced signal (from 480i to 480p) by scanning all 525 lines in 1/60 of a second for each pass. With vivid detail and accurate color reproduction, the higher density video signal creates DVD images close to how they originally appeared in the cinema. |
