This unit is really fast to turn on, its tray ejection mechanism is really fast and movies are also loaded really fast. On the DVD main menu we could select the play option by hitting “Play” on the remote control or on the player front panel, which is excellent (on some players you need to hit “Enter” and not “Play” to start playing a movie, which is really counter-intuitive).

When a movie is playing, the player response to commands to commands like previous/next chapter and scan backwards/forward is really fast.

We didn’t like the display configuration, though. Instead of showing the running time of the disc it shows the number of the chapter being played. And we couldn’t find a way to change this configuration.

We tried to play some problematic movies to see how this unit would play them. These movies are in widescreen format but somehow they send to the player the information that they are in 4:3 format, making them to appear with a black frame around them on some players, like if they were played inside a window (click here to see this problem in action). The movies we use to test this are Streets of Fire, A Night at the Roxbury and The Breakfast Club. At Panasonic DVD-S53 these movies were played with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, making the movie to play with the wrong aspect ratio – all characters were shorter and fatter. This was fixed by selecting the zoom1 option on our TV set, which main goal is to fix this issue.

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Figure 4: Movie playing with horizontal black bars and wrong aspect ratio.

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Figure 5: Problem fixed by selecting “zoom1” on our TV set.

The good thing about this player is that it has six different aspect ratio configurations for fixing problematic movies (4:3 Pan & scan, 4:3 Letterbox, 4:3 Zoom, 16:9 Normal, 16:9 Shrink and 16:9 Zoom).

After playing some regular DVDs we decided to burn some CDs and DVDs with some MPEG4 and Divx files to see how they would play on Panasonic DVD-S53.

We were impressed by the quality and response time while playing such files. They not only played at an outstanding quality – meaning that this unit uses an excellent decoder – but also the search function (i.e., skip forward/backward) worked just fine with a terrific response time. Since we were playing regular computer files we thought that this unit could have some delay between hitting the skip forward key and the image starting moving forward, which wasn’t the case.

We burned CDs, DVDs and dual-layer DVDs to see if we would run into any compatibility issues. CDs and regular DVDs (DVD-5) worked just fine, but this unit proved to be incompatible with dual-layer recordable DVDs (DVD-9), even though Panasonic lists this unit as being compatible with recordable dual-layer media.  After making a lot of noise the unit came with the message shown in Figure 6.

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Figure 6: We couldn’t play dual-layer recordable DVDs on this unit.

We burned four discs (copied three dual-layer DVDs from our collection and burned one dual-layer DVD with tons of Divx movies) and we couldn’t play any of them. The media was recorded just fine, as we could play the discs at two different PCs.