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Reviews and guides for all of the best all-in-one home cinema systems in the UK |
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Panasonic SCHT840 ReviewLike its cousin, the SCHT880, the SCHT840 is certainly a looker. Its DVD unit, with its stylised modern controls and angular edges, looks both modern and retro at the same time, the dual cone subwoofer is solid and plush, and the speakers, comprised of two slim towers and three small-footprint bookshelf speakers, look minimalist and stunningly seductive. The specifications on Panasonic SCHT840 the aren't too bad either - with a 800W RMS amp, this system is certainly capable of making some noise, and it comes with superb support for a wide range of media formats including DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RAM, CD, CD-R/RW, MP3/WMA, SVCD, VCD, JPEG, HDCD and HighMat. The Panasonic SCHT840 also supports the common sound decoding formats, namely Dolby Digital, DTS and Dolby ProLogic II, and best of all it comes with full PAL-compatible progressive scan for ultra-sharp beautiful images. Panasonic have put plenty of input and output formats into the unit. The SCHT840 sports both S-Video and RGB Scart video output, providing the best image quality available, and it also has phono audio out and digital optical audio out for recording sound or routing it to another device. Rarely, for an all-in-one home cinema system, this one also supports not only S-Video in but also RGB Scart in, making it absolutely flexible for making the most of your unit by playing your games console or PC movies through it. The Panasonic SCHT840 also of course supports photo audio in. Setting up the Panasonic SCHT840 is nice and easy, although as with the SCHT880 getting the tower stands put in place is a bit of a fiddle. Once its all set up stepping through the self test is very painless. Running the Panasonic SCHT840 through our test, the sound quality is powerful and emersive if lacking ever so slightly on subtlety and detail. The bass is good, and the audio field feels incredibly three dimensional. Even better though - the visuals are absolutely spot on. Mainly thanks to the enhanced clarity of the progressive scan and Panasonics excellent video technology, colours are well saturated and the images are sharp. We also noticed almost no MPEG artifacts at all, even in dark shots. 
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Conclusion The Panasonic SCHT840 is a good all-round performer, with good visuals and nice, powerful audio, even if the sound does lack ever so slightly in the details. It supports a really good and wide range of features and media formats, and it provides not only S-Video and RGB Scart outputs, but also progressive scan. What makes this stand out from the crowd though is its support for both S-Video and RGB scart inputs, which makes it one of the most flexible devices we've used. Oh, and it looks super too! Resources |