Panasonic SCHT880 Review

The Panasonic SCHT880 home cinema system certainly looks the part. With its silver sheen units, double cone subwoofer and tall, sleek speakers that stand like sentries around your room you certainly know that you're not getting some poxy little imitation of home cinema.

The specification presses all of the right buttons too - it has progressive scan technology to improve the image quality, it comes with S-Video out to make the most of your large screen digital TV, it comes with an RGB scart socket, and it comes with a shockingly impressive 1000W RMS amp. Audio decoding is well covered, with support for Dolby Digital Surround 5.1, DTS and Dolby ProLogic II, and it can accept a very large range of media including DVD, CD, DVDR, CDR, DVD-RAM, MP3/WMA CDs, JPEG CDs, VCD, SVCD and DVD-A. All in all - one pretty impressive box for a fairly low price.

Seting up the Panasonic SCHT880 was not too laborious, although building up the stands for the speakers was a bit of a chore, including the Ikea like task of digging out a screwdriver. But once the physical setup is done there's very little in the way of software setup required and you're ready to play your disks.

So how does it perform? Well, thanks to the progressive scan and S-Video connection the images look as good as you'd expect - nice clear lines and crisp colours make DVDs a joy to watch. And the sound? Well, this is where we thought the Panasonic SCHT880 started to let us down. It is great at high volumes, but at low volumes not only does it lose its crispness a little, but the subwoofer starts to hum! This is not what you'd expect from a good home cinema system. A bit of a play around and we came up with the reason for the interference: the AC adapter was too close to the subwoofer. Rather than fix the problem by putting some shielding into the subwoofer, Panasonic have opted for the easier option of adding in the troubleshooting section of their manual: "Keep other appliances and cables away from the subwoofer". After this minor irritation, the sound was impressive even at low volumes, although the lack of crispness at still persisted a little. Having the speakers on the stands worked out to be worth the effort as well, as the positioning the SCHT880 speakers at optimal height around the room was a synch.

Pros

Progressive scan support
S-Video and RGB Scart output
Great picture quality, good sound
Great media and decoder support

Cons

Annoying interference glitch with the AC adapter
Slightly fussy setup

Conclusion

The Panasonic SCHT880 is overall a very decent home cinema system. Good sound and great picture, supported by progressive scan, help make the best of a great line up of decoder support and disc formats. Awkward assembly and interference from the AC adapter are the main annoyances, and the sound loses sharpness a little at low volumes, but all of these are solvable. Generally recommended and well priced.

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