Panasonic UB820/UB9000 4K UHD Blu-ray player

[thirdkind]

Originally Posted by MEB

I am expecting a Spears & Munsil disc to arrive. I'll be sure to check that clip via my UB9000 on my Sony 640E. Maybe the HDR10 clip is encoded improperly? (Seems unlikely, but you never know.)

Mark

Looking forward to your report, thanks.

[panasonicst60]

Originally Posted by thirdkind

I tried lower nit settings and the result is the same.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Sony OLEDs, so forgive me if I'm telling you anything you already know since I don't post here often and don't know anyone all that well. Their calibration is a bit unique in that they don't have separate HDR settings; you calibrate for SDR and then the display performs the necessary math to translate those settings for HDR. Contrast out of the box is set to 90 and CalMAN determined that tracks perfectly for 2.2 gamma, so that should result in a correct EOTF curve for HDR as well. Changing it while watching an HDR source will also change it for SDR, so you're not supposed to touch it once you've done an SDR calibration. If I lower it while watching HDR sources, all it does is lower the white level without revealing any of the crushed highlights.

Toggling Optimizer on and off is weird on the A9F. Turn it on during the horse scene and you can see some of the highlights reappear (not much compared to the DV version), but then it's as if the display is actively working against the Optimizer because those details slowly fade away once Sony's dynamic tone mapping kicks in.

Sounds like there are issues with the Sony oled and not the Panasonic...To be honest, calibrating for sdr and the tv display performs the necessary math to translate those settings for HDR, just doesn't sound right at all. Have you tried a different 4k player? If it looks the same as it did that would tell you that it's the tv that's at fault. Honestly if you turn off all the settings on the Panasonic and it still looks like that then it's the Sony. Also have you tried factory resetting the tv to default settings to see if it fixes the problem?

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by thirdkind

I tried lower nit settings and the result is the same.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Sony OLEDs, so forgive me if I'm telling you anything you already know since I don't post here often and don't know anyone all that well. Their calibration is a bit unique in that they don't have separate HDR settings; you calibrate for SDR and then the display performs the necessary math to translate those settings for HDR. Contrast out of the box is set to 90 and CalMAN determined that tracks perfectly for 2.2 gamma, so that should result in a correct EOTF curve for HDR as well. Changing it while watching an HDR source will also change it for SDR, so you're not supposed to touch it once you've done an SDR calibration. If I lower it while watching HDR sources, all it does is lower the white level without revealing any of the crushed highlights.

Toggling Optimizer on and off is weird on the A9F. Turn it on during the horse scene and you can see some of the highlights reappear (not much compared to the DV version), but then it's as if the display is actively working against the Optimizer because those details slowly fade away once Sony's dynamic tone mapping kicks in.

I know, but I like 2.3 gamma for SDR so I store SDR under a different scene select to HDR (which have all been calibrated/assessed with a colourimeter and HCFR, for what that's worth). It does however appear that the fundamentals have changed in the years since the ZD9, first with the addition of Sony's own in-house dynamic tone mapping and now that the contrast control doesn't recover highlight detail because that's exactly what it does on the ZD9.

To that end I keep a third preset for 4000-nit mastered content on my telly, using the contrast control to claw back lost highlight information at the expense of some overall brightness, though when watching in a darkened room it's not a major issue and Stacey even recommended having a reduced brightness mode for watching such content anyway owing to the correlation between increased luminance and increased motion judder. (I use this method rather than the Optimiser because it still hews to an actual HDR tone curve rather than the flatter SDR-esque shape of the Panny's HDR Optimised curves, the latter keeps the average brightness up for lots of superficial 'pop' but lacks the true dynamism of HDR's range from light to dark).

In any case, I think you hit the nail on the head: the TV's dynamic mapping is doing its thing and unfortunately it's overriding whatever the Optimiser is up to. The Optimiser alters the actual metadata output from the player to the TV so the Sony can't be using that to detect the tone mapping, can it? It must be analysing the actual picture itself in real time and even with the Optimiser on it's able to detect that the horsey scene is bright AF (like I said, those highlights on the snow are over 4000 nits!) and it's crushing it to balls accordingly.

[thirdkind]

Originally Posted by panasonicst60

Sounds like there are issues with the Sony oled and not the Panasonic...To be honest, calibrating for sdr and the tv display performs the necessary math to translate those settings for HDR, just doesn't sound right at all.

You better let the pro calibrators who keep choosing Sony OLEDs at the annual shootout know that these sets don't calibrate well Pretty sure Robert from VE and Vincent from HDTVTest would have something to say about it.

Originally Posted by panasonicst60

Have you tried a different 4k player? If it looks the same as it did that would tell you that it's the tv that's at fault. Honestly if you turn off all the settings on the Panasonic and it still looks like that then it's the Sony. Also have you tried factory resetting the tv to default settings to see if it fixes the problem?

I also have the LX500 in my system and it looks similar. It's totally possible that it's the display, but I'm having trouble getting anyone with the S&M disc to verify. This particular scene with the horses is a torture test for HDR tone mapping; while there are some clipped highlights in some other scenes, nothing else in the demo comes close to this. Before I go to the trouble of a factory reset on the display, it would be nice to have someone else with a Sony OLED and frankly any 4K player see how this scene looks. Seeing it on an LG would be helpful as well.

I'm hesitant to do a factory reset because I'd either have to recalibrate the display or write down all the 20-point calibration settings and re-enter them manually.

I have a pile of 4K discs here. What is some other good test material for me to check clipped highlights?

[thirdkind]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

I know, but I like 2.3 gamma for SDR so I store SDR under a different scene select to HDR (which have all been calibrated/assessed with a colourimeter and HCFR, for what that's worth). It does however appear that the fundamentals have changed in the years since the ZD9, first with the addition of Sony's own in-house dynamic tone mapping and now that the contrast control doesn't recover highlight detail because that's exactly what it does on the ZD9.

To that end I keep a third preset for 4000-nit mastered content on my telly, using the contrast control to claw back lost highlight information at the expense of some overall brightness, though when watching in a darkened room it's not a major issue and Stacey even recommended having a reduced brightness mode for watching such content anyway owing to the correlation between increased luminance and increased motion judder. (I use this method rather than the Optimiser because it still hews to an actual HDR tone curve rather than the flatter SDR-esque shape of the Panny's HDR Optimised curves, the latter keeps the average brightness up for lots of superficial 'pop' but lacks the true dynamism of HDR's range from light to dark).

In any case, I think you hit the nail on the head: the TV's dynamic mapping is doing its thing and unfortunately it's overriding whatever the Optimiser is up to. The Optimiser alters the actual metadata output from the player to the TV so the Sony can't be using that to detect the tone mapping, can it? It must be analysing the actual picture itself in real time and even with the Optimiser on it's able to detect that the horsey scene is bright AF (like I said, those highlights on the snow are over 4000 nits!) and it's crushing it to balls accordingly.

Ha, yeah. Probably.

On the A9F, you can change the gamma setting for SDR to whatever you want after calibration (I use -2, which is the equivalent of 2.4) and as long as you keep HDR gamma at baseline (0), it'll map EOTF correctly. It's weird because gamma is unique per mode (SDR/HDR), but contrast will change on both modes if you touch it. I'm a UX designer and I'd love to have a go at Sony's menu design because it confused the hell out of me at first.

Adjusting contrast above 90 will crush detail like it always has; I'm just not seeing any of it being recovered if I lower it, meaning 90 is the sweet spot.

Sony's tone mapping is dynamic, so it's changing things scene-by-scene, yeah. Who knows how much the disc's static metadata influences the decisions the display makes during each scene...possibly not at all.

[Geoff D]

That's still common to the old and new Sony sets then, that they keep *some* adjustments exclusive to HDR and SDR when you change them (when using the same scene select) but some are changed on a global level, which is verr counterintuitive. For the record I haven't moved gamma from baseline (0) in HDR but it's in -1 for 2.3 in SDR.

[panasonicst60]

I really don't need this disc as I already have Ray's calibration disc. But I just bought one an Amazon for same day delivery. I will let you know how this scene looks on my calibrated LG c8 and ub820, fingers crossed.

If you can, let me know where to locate this scene so I don't waste too much time looking for it.

[thirdkind]

Originally Posted by panasonicst60

I really don't need this disc as I already have Ray's calibration disc. But I just bought one an Amazon for same day delivery. I will let you know how this scene looks on my calibrated LG c8 and ub820, fingers crossed.

If you can, let me know where to locate this scene so I don't waste too much time looking for it.

Awesome, thank you. Just go to the Demo Material section and you can compare different versions of the same video. Both the 4,000 and 10,000 nit versions of the HDR10 video show the extreme clipping on my setup, while the DV version shows all the highlights.

The horse scene is in the first chapter, probably no more than a minute in. The mountain scene that precedes it is also a good test because of the clouds.

It'll be interesting to see how your LG handles it since you can do various combinations of display tone mapping on/off and Optimizer on/off.

[UB9000]

Hi,
I have many 4k Movies many of which are with high nits.
I have found no issues with DV and HDR10 from 1000Nits to 10000Nits movies
I have a Sony 9400E 75" and have set the UB9000 to 1500nits output as its best suited for this TV.
I have set the TV inline with RTINGS settings and all these high nit movies look great in UB90000 DV to DV TV and HDR10 with HDR optimizer to TV.
I think a lot of the issues with OLED is that it is too low in nits and therefore does more clipping on the higher nit films than a higher rate nits TV.
Sony 9400E 75" is still rated the best LED TV for Movies.
Regards,
UB9000

[PoorSignal]

Hi all, I have a 1080p projector, was just wondering do I set it to
HDR/BT2020 or SDR/BT2020, or does it have any difference since the projector will be detected as SDR anyway.

[panasonicst60]

Originally Posted by thirdkind

Awesome, thank you. Just go to the Demo Material section and you can compare different versions of the same video. Both the 4,000 and 10,000 nit versions of the HDR10 video show the extreme clipping on my setup, while the DV version shows all the highlights.

The horse scene is in the first chapter, probably no more than a minute in. The mountain scene that precedes it is also a good test because of the clouds.

It'll be interesting to see how your LG handles it since you can do various combinations of display tone mapping on/off and Optimizer on/off.

Ok got the disc in. I compared both DV and hdr10 at 10000 nits. With lg's dynamic tone mapping on there are some clipping but definitely not extreme like on the Sony. DV looks awesome. I don't know how to post pics up on here to show, as I have never done that on this forum. Maybe I'll try to figure it out in a bit

Edit: links below.
1st hdr10
2nd DV





https://photos.app.goo.gl/xAtV5jYUcrHhTfs27
https://photos.app.goo.gl/J4FpB4gmVnst2vCn8

[panasonicst60]

This Spears and Munsil is a monster at evaluating. I will be putting the hdr optimizer and the LG's dynamic tone mapping to the test. Looks like I was totally wrong saying the lg dynamic tone mapping was garbage. Looks like it's doing a hella of job at tone mapping these 10000 nits test videos. Boy was I wrong. My apologies. On to more testing.

Quick test of the hdr optimizer shows it changes the color tone of colors too much. For example the color of the horse without it on looks more natural and extremely similar to the DV......

[nachoju95]

Hi.
I recently bought the UB820 and was testing it with the UHD disc of "The Dark Knight", but when I press the "Playback Info" button it appears that the output is SDR and not HDR (I understand that HDR should appear):


Also when I press "HDR SETTING", it tells me that this setting is only for HDR image, saying that the image is not HDR.

The TV also does not detect the HDR and when I enter the TV settings, the settings for SDR appear.
Can you please help me, did I set something wrong in the player? I have an LG B7 OLED, the player is connected by a belkin HDMI cable:

[Mobe1969]

Originally Posted by nachoju95

Hi.
I recently bought the UB820 and was testing it with the UHD disc of "The Dark Knight", but when I press the "Playback Info" button it appears that the output is SDR and not HDR (I understand that HDR should appear):


Also when I press "HDR SETTING", it tells me that this setting is only for HDR image, saying that the image is not HDR.

The TV also does not detect the HDR and when I enter the TV settings, the settings for SDR appear.
Can you please help me, did I set something wrong in the player? I have an LG B7 OLED, the player is connected by a belkin HDMI cable:

That sort of looks either like a handshaking issue, or it is not detecting a HDCP 2.1 port on whatever it is connected to. If your receiver isn't HDCP2.1, or can't just do a straight passthrough, you will get this occurring. If your TV port isn't 2.1, you'll get this as well.

I was actually getting this on my sony projector as for some silly reason, on those models, the HDMI ports weren't defaulting to "enhanced" / HDCP 2.1. So out of the box, the projector was setup for HDCP 2.0 only, and you had to manually set the ports to Enhanced. It makes no sense why they did it that way.

I also get it occasionally still, due to handshaking. If it happens, toggle inputs on the receiver and TV to force it to handshake again. I ended up changing my harmony activity to put in a 20 second delay before starting the player, 10 seconds before starting the receiver. So you want to start TV first, then receiver, then player..

[pbz06]

Just curious, why do we care about 10,000 nit content and how it tonemaps?

[David M]

NachoJu95: Are you by any chance running the player through an older, non-HDR capable AV receiver? Which TV are you using?

PBZ06: it matters because while content can hit 10,000 nits, no display currently can. So tone mapping of content that bright is something being done by every single HDR display currently in existence.

[panasonicst60]

Originally Posted by pbz06

Just curious, why do we care about 10,000 nit content and how it tonemaps?

We should as some are mastered at 10000. Also for a bit of future proofing. You should at least care about 4000 as a lot of uhds are mastered at.

[nachoju95]

Originally Posted by Mobe1969

That sort of looks either like a handshaking issue, or it is not detecting a HDCP 2.1 port on whatever it is connected to. If your receiver isn't HDCP2.1, or can't just do a straight passthrough, you will get this occurring. If your TV port isn't 2.1, you'll get this as well.

I was actually getting this on my sony projector as for some silly reason, on those models, the HDMI ports weren't defaulting to "enhanced" / HDCP 2.1. So out of the box, the projector was setup for HDCP 2.0 only, and you had to manually set the ports to Enhanced. It makes no sense why they did it that way.

I also get it occasionally still, due to handshaking. If it happens, toggle inputs on the receiver and TV to force it to handshake again. I ended up changing my harmony activity to put in a 20 second delay before starting the player, 10 seconds before starting the receiver. So you want to start TV first, then receiver, then player..

I tried replacing the Belkin HDMI cable with another one that had normal which is 4K that I use for the PS4 and keep doing that. Is it some TV or player configuration that generates that?

[nachoju95]

Originally Posted by David M

NachoJu95: Are you by any chance running the player through an older, non-HDR capable AV receiver? Which TV are you using?

David M, I am not using an AV receiver, I only have the player connected directly to the TV.
I have an LG B7 OLED and I have it connected by a belkin hdmi 2.1 cable.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by nachoju95

David M, I am not using an AV receiver, I only have the player connected directly to the TV.
I have an LG B7 OLED and I have it connected by a belkin hdmi 2.1 cable.

Turn 24p ON and make sure that the 4K60 settings are set to 4:4:4 and not 4:2:0.