The much-maligned “home theater in a box” (HTiB) category has had a tough time shaking its “Home Theater for Dummies” reputation, perceived as putting value and convenience above all else, including performance. And while the Panasonic SC-BT200 Blu-ray Theater was quick and painless to install and the overall value is tremendous, at some point during my demos I realized that tucked away in the carton between the molded Styrofoam and bags of accessories, there were some major audio features and solid performance.

Look a little deeper and you’ll find that the SC-BT200 packs some pretty high-end video guts for a “lifestyle” product, especially one so affordable. Panasonic has a great big building in Southern California (I’ve been there) where guys in labcoats are dedicated to keeping the company at least slightly ahead of their time, with some of the most consistently put-your-eyeballs-back-in-your-head picture quality.

Thanks to breakthroughs like the PHL (Panasonic Hollywood Labs) Reference Chroma Processor Plus and P4HD (Pixel Precision Progressive Processing for HD), Panasonic Blu-ray players can keep up with the best of them with high quality DVD upconversion and breathtaking Blu-ray image quality. Features such as high-precision 4:4:4 color output,  1080/24p Playback for Blu-ray Discs and DVDs (if supported by both software and display) and Deep Color support are things you rarely see in mid- to high-end standalone Blu-ray players, let alone packaged HTiB systems.

Turn-Ons:

* Don’t be fooled by the small speakers: They pump out BIG sound.
* Convenient audio inputs for additional sources, but…

Turn-Offs:

* …No video inputs beyond the iPod dock
* While impressive, video quality lacks the “wow” factor of other recent Panasonic standalone Blu-ray offerings

Final Thoughts

The video was definitely respectable, but with Panasonic’s Hollywood pedigree, I was certainly not expecting the audio to exceed it, especially with those microspeakers and that bargain pricetag. But the SC-BT200 rocks, and can turn an LCD or plasma into a full-blown home theater, in minutes.