Panasonic CQ-DF783U Car CD / MP3 Player

MP3 Playback. There are no audible flaws in decoding the bitstream. There are annoyances, however. If you pause and then resume playback, it will not resume from the same position. About 1 second is skipped. Song files meant to be played back to back, with no gap (as they would be on your computer), are played with a gap by this deck. Also, at one point the deck took a 7-second break for no apparent reason, but I could not reproduce this problem. In this instance, it is quite possible my MP3 file was non-compliant (perhaps the bitrate was variable and too high). According to the manual, the supported bitrates (in kbps) are as follows:

MPEG 1 audio layer 3 (MP3): 32-320

MPEG 2 audio layer 3 (MP3): 8-160

Windows Media Audio Ver. 2, Ver. 8: 64-192

Variable bitrate (VBR) is supported for MP3 but not WMA. To further quote the manual, "VBR is not recommended because playing time is not displayed properly and sound may be skipped." The deck seems to handle higher bitrates than specified gracefully but apparently not always.

The manual makes no mention of the recording speed you should be writing your CDRs at. I wrote mine at 10X on high quality 80-minute Kodak blanks and the unit had no problems at all reading them. The disks can get quite hot inside the player on a summer day, resulting in accelerated aging of CDR's, so I believe using durable blanks is a prudent thing to do.

Interface. The layout of the controls is conventional and the interface is for the most part intuitive. Most permanent setting menus are entered by holding a button for 2 seconds. This includes controlling the display's brightness, turning the display off, autoprogramming preset radiostations and switching between file/folder name and ID3/WMA tag display.

Here are what I consider to be the key problems with this interface:

1. Seeking to a different folder takes too long. If I am in folder 4 and want to go to folder 12, I should just press the [^] button blindly 8 times. But no, each time I press the [^] button, I must wait about 2 seconds for the folder contents to load before I am allowed to continue. This distracts from driving and can become a safety issue.

2. The brightness and display on/off controls are there but are buried too deep in the menus.

3. Scroll button too close to "next folder" button; trying to read the track title may cause you to accidentally jump to a different folder.

4. Some functions, for example Direct Memory (i.e. recalling your single most favourite radiostation) appear to enter a "priority mode" wherein most features of the deck are disabled until you exit the priority mode. Needless counterintuitive design.

Display. I find the display bright and very visible even in sunglasses at high noon. And it has a 3-level dimmer control and a display off control (see update below, though). There is no illumination wire so your headlight switch does not affect display brightness (I like my headlights always on, so I am happy).

Downsides? The display shows only 8 characters in a fixed-width font. This is great for numbers but not very meaningful for textual information such as song / album / artist titles. You might think the scroll mode would help but the scroll mode is strange on this unit: the text scrolls by once after you push the scroll button, or after a new track starts playing, then the display goes back to the first 8 characters of the text. (I have a feeling Panasonic want us to keep our eyes on the road.) The displayable character set comprises the characters on a US keyboard plus accented vowels from the ASCII set. You can forget ID3 tags written in languages with non-Latin alphabets. Another quirk: you can turn off the jumping bars of the spectrum analyzer (whilst keeping the rest of the display on), but cannot turn off the jumping volume bars or the spinning CD icon.

UPDATED 27 June 2003: There is a major design flaw not apparent at first sight: given how bright the display is, you would tend to turn it off to preserve your eyes' dark adaptation during night driving. However, with this unit, off does not mean off. It will turn on for a few seconds with every new MP3 song, which causes pupils to shrink and can startle the driver. This behaviour cannot be turned off! To make matters worse, when the display flicks on, it goes to its brightest setting before dimming to user-selected level. I think the designers have made a fine use of technology with very little consideration for the user. On a positive note, the startle feature does not occur with plain audio CD's.

Warranty. 1 year, while some other Panasonic products in the same line come with 2-year warranty. There might be a reason for that in terms of quality control.