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Panasonic CQ RDP383
by Bluetone
Influenced by the other 3 owners reviews, I set about researching a Panasonic CQ RDP 383 for the new car I was getting two weeks ago. I saw it initially at £100 + £10 delivery online, but I took a quick look in the latest Argos catalogue as saw it was £150 with free fitting at a garage of your choice. Not being the most ... technically minded, and not wanting to mess up the installation, I was going to opt for this. I asked the Car dealers to quote me a price for it as well?.
"yep we can do it for £150 in your new car"
hmm hoped they would undercut it. Anyways due to a mix up in the price for my car, I stuck to my guns and demanded that they either go out and fit the Panasonic in the car for free or I won't buy the car..it worked..
Looks wise, the head unit is pretty cool. In the day time, it's ok, but as the night comes, is a lovely blue neon display with some red buttons for track skipping. Nice shiny silver trim around the display as well. Comes with a little box (like a sunglasses box) to put the head unit in which is nice enough. Detaching the head unit from the main CD Box is as easy as pressing a button on the top right of the face, it pops out and you put it in the little box to take into your house for safe keeping. When coming back to your car in the morning you just click the head unit back into place and your ready, takes about 5 seconds.
Performance wise, does what it says on the box. One thing I found strange was that while other manufacturers are clear to point out that their unit has EON (automatically finds the strongest signal for a radio station), the Panasonic doesn't advertise this. Well it's got it, together with RDS (displays radio station names), MP3 and WMA ability. The Player can also display ID3 tags for your MP3's (basically this means it will display the artist/album/title on the display while the song plays).
If noone quite understands what MP3 and WMA is, t
hey are 2 of the
major ways to compress a song off a normal audio CD to about 1/10 of its original size. This basically means you can fit about 10 times as many songs onto a recordable CD that you make on your home computer. The difference between MP3 and WMA is that WMA is Microsoft's version of MP3, but there's no real difference both in sound or file size. One advantage that WMA has over MP3 is that Windows XP has a program built into it called Windows Media Player, and with this you can encode your music CD's into WMA....only WMA though. Mind you, there are plenty of free MP3 encoders available on the internet. Of course you will need a CD Writer drive for your computer but these can be picked up for about £40 new now. I've got a 40x CD writer in my computer and it takes about 4 minutes to write 200+ songs onto a blank CD.
A funny thing the car dealer said to me as he was handing me over the various manuals for the car - "how much do these MP3 discs cost?". Well if anyone's wondering this, I'll tell you what I told him - you don't need any special CD to write MP3's onto, just a standard writeable CD (CD-R or CD-R/W) and as for the cost, well I recently went to Jessops camera shop on the high street and bought 100 black CD's on a spindle for £19.99, so if each CD can hold 200+ MP3's, thats a lot of music for 20 quid....
Of course you don't just have to encode your own music CD's, there are millions of songs online if you know where to look for them....cough, kazaa, cough.
I personally use a program called MusicMatch Jukebox which organises my MP3's and easily lets you write them to a CD. Before I went to get my car from the dealers I quickly made up a CD (about 200 songs on it). Once driving the car home, I just pushed in the CD; the player knew what to do with it and it was playing songs within a couple of seconds.
Anyway, I'm a happy customer of Panasonic
and can say that if y
ou get this unit, you will be as happy as I am.
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