The A310 has worked great since I bought it 3 months ago. I thought the features for the money were outstanding. I have had no glitches with any DVDs and my CDs sound vey good also. Definitely recommended.

I bought this player becuase the price was right. Picture quality and sound are outstanding. My only complaint is that I can't play cdr (the zoom feature on teh Toshibas would also be a nice-to-have). I am very happy with this player and recommend it to anyone in the market for a mid-end dvd player.

Does an excellent job. Have it for two months now and plays back everything perfectly. Even does an excellent job as a CD player. Chose over Toshiba 3108 because I heard that Toshiba had problems with their software for it.

I have recently posted the best review of this product. I have to repost a negative review. I just watched the Mask of Zorro and 3 out of 15 times after the layer change, it skipped chapter 18 and went to chapter 19. The layer change is at the end of ch.17/beginning of ch.18. There was no abnormal pause many have been reporting but the ch. skip is unacceptable. This is the worst glitch possible, skipping movie scenes. I would have not even noticed if it were not for the audio silence on the layer change. I didn't even see it. I wanted to check if that was the layer change everyone has been complaining about. When I scanned back to it, I realized I was scanning through scenes I didn't watch. I called Panasonic, the reps didn't know of the problem. They transfered me to a technical rep. . He stated the problem has been reported to them from other customers. They stated the disc was at fault, but also stated the player could also be at fault. The 2 put together equalled a chapter skip. They knew of no firmware upgrade and stated that my August date did not matter. Later dates will have the problem also. They gave me a number for a service center that may know of a new firmware upgrade that would be handled through servicing. I declined to call, the number was a toll call. They were helpful, but this problem is to major to me. I am greatly disappointed in this DVD format. I put off a laserdisc player purchase for this proglitch format. The DVDs have also made laserdiscs a rare item to find now. I at this point, do not know whether to purchase another player from a different maker, or just wait years for them to manufactor an error free and COMPATABLE product. I am greatly irritated by this! Other brands have had different reports of glitches. So this format is no more than a gamble! I have already invested in DVDs which I wish I had not. The fix for any of these players is a newly shipped model without the problems. Servicing is nothing but inconvient and time consuming. The customer should not have to have this problem fixed. They should have a trade up policy. Servicing is something I will not DO! It is their responsibility to keep me as a customer, not mine to keep them in BUSINESS!

I just purchased this player. I orginally had a Panasonic DVD-X410 Divx enhanced player but exchanged it for the 310 because of the expensive Divx discs and that the 410 turned out to be $60 more with many less features than the 310. Both players were orginally $499.99 at Circuit City. Best Buy at the time of exchange had the 310 for only $449.99 but were still sold out from Christmas. CC would not do a price match since they had none in stock. Today, Best Buy had a price raise to $469.99 on the 310, plus had them in stock today. Circuit City now did the 110% price beating tactic. I got the player technically now for only $465. The 410 receives only 1 free DVD. The 310 receives 2 DVDs. Each DVD price up to $25. Now I have an extra free $25 DVD plus a savings of $35 for a total of $60 from a player with many more features. What a deal on the top rated 310! I read on a post about the layer changes on the T2 disc. I watched this DVD on the 410 and didn't see this layer change as well as many 110 and 310 owners. I most likely will rent again to see if I detect it at the points where someone stated " she's carving on the picnic table...". I believe this will not show as the 410 is exactly the 110 with video CD capability taken away and Divx capability added. It is a 2nd gen. player and not a 3rd gen. player that will come out in a few months with some useless added features. They are nice for kicks, but not really useable in my opinion. The picture quality is excellent with no detectable video noise. Just as the 410 was. The DD is awesome as is Digital and Analog PCM. The picture preferences are quite useless to me. The Normal mode is what I prefer. The Soft mode looks as if an artsy soft filter was adding, deleting all detail with a fuzzy, smudged looked. The Fine mode was to harsh to my eyes adding an intense edge to objects. In reality these adjustments are no more than just a sharpness setting which can be done from the television. The Soft mode will come in handy on those B-films that have horribly poor transfers with pixellation. I know of no use for the Fine mode though. I actually bought a video CD to test the features of this machine. Funny thing is, the computer software stores are not stocking them much anymore since DVD-Rom is becoming popular with titles that are not priced that much more, but offer much more performance. I remember seeing Star Gate on Video CD about 4 months ago. It was a 2 CD set. Well the only Video CD the software store had available was Playboys Jenny Macarthy which is also a dual CD set. She tends to annoy me. I think from memories of her on MTV. The disc will none the less show me a new world of discs with video data. I think the sound quality on CDs equals or even betters my Yamaha player. This doesn't surprise me as many Audio/video magazines use this player as their reference DVD player and their CD player on some tests. The CD playback has been reviewed as being better than most stand alone $600 CD players. This gives me the confidence that I will not miss the subtle detail inherent in some CD recordings. I must give this a 5 star rating as the next step up doubles the cost of the Panasonic. That step would be the Sony 7000/7700 which the 310 has been called a direct competitor with. Yamaha and Denon modify this player with their cabinets and names. That should be a clue this is one great machine!

Nice piece, great picture, relatively good sound, have tried 24/96 disc which is very impressive relative to conventional 16/44. However I must try mod listed in this months Stereophile to improve some sound shortcomings. If this is the future of where we are going or where we can be, with this new audio format, than I am very excited at the prospects.

I've owned this since March and havn't had any problems. No skipping ahead on layer changes. I initially purchased a Sony 3000 but didn't like the picture softness when playing anamorphic enhanced discs. If it played cdr's it would be a 5.

I purchased the A310 from audioexcellence.com and hooked up the unit through my vcr at first to my television. After watching a DVD for about 1 hour I noticed that blured boxes appeared on the screen. I tried a few other DVD's and noticed that the problem got worse. The next day a put the DVD in the unit and it did not even recognize the disk. I tried audio and dvd and had problems. I returned the unit and purchased a Pioneer DVD-606D. The Pioneer is amazing and blows away the unit on sound and picture quality.

I originally bought the Panasonic A310 to be the final compliment to my system.Being the Technics SA-AX6 Reciever and JBL SCS120 speaker system. Unfortunately
that did not happen.

The Pros: Nice looking unit....the face plate seemed average with all the necessary functions. The back was rich with jacks(gold plated) and seemed to have everything a unit in it's range would have.

The Cons: Setup was cumbersome and one REALLY had to read the manual (which wasn't laid out too well) in order to set it up. The remote was fair at best. When you moved about in a menu, you had to point the remote right at the unit and it took a couple of tries on the joystick in order to move around. As annoying as it was, I might have lived with that. The picture: The DVDs that I played seemd to get this faded crawl on the right hand side of my TV. It was very noticeable when it was black. Now for the big reason I returned it, the sound. Center channel was extremely weak. I even went into my receiver and jacked up the center to 12dB. that wasn't enough. You had to really pay attention in order to hear anything in the way of voices. I tried everything i could to make it work new connections, etc..etc..It wasn't the speakers nor my receiver. It could've been a defective unit, but I did not replace it with another to find out (not to mention, I don't think they make this model anymore). I will next try either the Toshiba 3109 which is due out later in the month or the JVC
XV-D701BK which is also a new model. Which-ever I can get my hands on first!

After reading many of the reviews regarding this unit, I am at a total loss asto why it has generated so many negative attributes such as skipping, not playing certain discs, generating funny lines etc.. I have lived with this unit
for nearly a year now and am extremely satisfied with it's performance in every
aspect. The picture is sharp, audio is clean and the remote has always worked
well. I play DTS DVD's/CD's on a regular basis and they've always played
perfectly! A Warning to all those easily influenced by bad reviews, a number
of these owners obviously dropped them on the way home or they fell into their living room fishbowl! This unit is a fine example of DVD technology! Purchase
one you get a good price, you will not be disapointed!