Panasonic UB820/UB9000 4K UHD Blu-ray player

[Kaonashi]

Originally Posted by pbz06

[Show spoiler]The HDR Optimizer is a static/fixed tonemapper. It reads the data on the disk (max brightness, average brightness etc.) and tonemaps it down to the target for the display you have. Panasonic is suggesting they tonemap faithfully and can do it better than most TV's, and gives the TV a more manageable set of information. For example, a TV might see a max luminance of 4,000 nits but not realize the majority of the movie is filmed with a max of 200 nits, so it will crunch down 4,000 worth of range down to its capabilities...and that 200 nits might now be 100 nits and so on...resulting in a dim picture.

I set it on and forget it, but I also have OLED. Sony likes to maintain accuracy at the expense of clipping highlights...which is great and all, but for the movies that are mastered with high nits (up to 4,000 or whatever), it can make a difference in resolving a little more detail. In most movies though, it's no effect and not really a big deal to worry about.

But what you describe is a good example of the shortcomings of "dynamic" tonemapping.

Thanks for the explanation! So it works both ways with regards to ‘optimising’ then. For the cases of 200nits movies with 4000nits moments, will these moments be more clipped as a result of the optimiser relieving the dimness caused by the TV’s mapping?

I also think I read something about it introducing a bit of banding, as well as a ‘smooth gradations’ function, is this a feature on the player?

[James Luckard]

I understand I'm going against the received wisdom around here, but until I pushed those settings to those extremes, the dark areas of the image were all pitch black, and the entire image was covered with a dim haze, especially on BDs, which are the vast majority of my collection and always will be.

Absolutely nothing looks overly bright, overly contrasty or overexposed now, it all looks normal and within a normal range.

I would post comparison photos, but it would be useless, since photos can't really represent a screen.

But just as I recognize I'm a heretic for thinking there was motion smoothing being created by the player itself (yes, I still left 24p turned off on the HDMI output, as Aunt Peg recommended, so Meryl Streep doesn't look like she's in The Hobbit in The Post), and was fine with being considered that, I'm also fine with being thought of as a heretic for having these settings.

99% of what I'll watch on this machine will still be BDs, and these were the only settings that made the image at all watchable, I tried about a dozen different BDs out, in addition to about half a dozen UHD discs. All the UHDs I tried looked their best this way too.

Until I adjusted the settings this way, when I played the UHD of Hook, for example, anything remotely dark was entirely pitch black, and also had colorful halos within portions of it.

[TravisTylerBlack]

Originally Posted by Woodsy

Appreciate the update. I received my UB820 in the mail yesterday and just tested as well...more good news to report! I tried 'Visa to Canton' and 'The Scarlet Blade' from the Hammer Vol 5 set, also 'I, Monster' and ALL were successful with the Top Menu trick!

My UB820 has been able to play every region B Arrow, Indicator, and Eureka/MOC disc that I've thrown at it via the top menu trick. StudioCanal on the other hand has been a complete no-go apart from the handful of UHDs I have from them. Still need to test my Second Sight and BFI titles.

Love this player so much. The endless customization options have spoiled me. Very much considering purchasing a second as a backup like some users here seem to have done.

[hagios]

Originally Posted by TravisTylerBlack

My UB820 has been able to play every region B Arrow, Indicator, and Eureka/MOC disc that I've thrown at it via the top menu trick. StudioCanal on the other hand has been a complete no-go apart from the handful of UHDs I have from them. Still need to test my Second Sight and BFI titles.

Love this player so much. The endless customization options have spoiled me. Very much considering purchasing a second as a backup like some users here seem to have done.

Forgive my ignorance but what is the “top menu trick”?

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by hagios

Forgive my ignorance but what is the “top menu trick”?

On Panasonic players, insert foreign discs, get the screen saying they won't play.

Hit Stop, Top Menu, Top Menu.

The player skips right past that screen to the main menu in 90% of cases.

[pbz06]

Originally Posted by Kaonashi

Thanks for the explanation! So it works both ways with regards to ‘optimising’ then. For the cases of 200nits movies with 4000nits moments, will these moments be more clipped as a result of the optimiser relieving the dimness caused by the TV’s mapping?

I also think I read something about it introducing a bit of banding, as well as a ‘smooth gradations’ function, is this a feature on the player?

Not exactly.

The benefit is that the Optimizer will bring and tonemap the 4000 stuff to 1000, for example, and not touch anything below. It works well when you find a scene with clipping and toggle on vs off...it basically doesn't touch any of the midtones and dark areas.

I think Goodfellas is a good example. If I recall, that has metadata of 4,000 nits peak...but literally the entire movie is like around 65 nits max. I forget the exact numbers, but you get the point. So a TV with a non sophisticated tonemapping (static) might compress the entire range which will mean a dark picture even darker...and people complaining how dark the movie is. With the Optimizer, it's sophsticated enough to not touch the image from 0-1000, and most TV's these days don't struggle with 1,000 nits.

The banding issue, I haven't seen it myself. The sample Geoff pointed out was in the movie Fury with a sky in the background. I have that movie but haven't had a chance to check it out. The smooth gradation is a Sony TV setting.

[WKoA13]

Bit of an update to my situation from a few pages back.

Further trying to figure out the lack of Dolby Vision when plugged into my JBL 9.1, I tried swapping it out with my Nvidia Shield again, and while I did have to turn DV back on in the Shield menu, I DID get Dolby Vision on my display with DV titles on Netflix etc, using the same monoprice certified high speed cable as I had with the Panny 820.

Swapped them back, double checked all the video settings on the Panny.. Same results. No DV going through the JBL bar whatsoever.

So, for now, I'll just stick with the Panny going directly into the A8H, and the Shield into the bar. Maybe later I'll deal with pulling my Sony X700 player out from the secondary entertainment center to see if it will pass DV through the bar to the TV.

But, at the moment it seems to be something with the Panny player itself that's not allowing a DV signal passthrough.

(I did also have to switch the Panny audio output from PCM to Bistream, as passing PCM through the Sony TV [also set to PCM and Passthrough on/auto] resulted quite audio that was also...reversed? Dialogue coming from characters in the middle of the screen was coming through the rears while rear/environmental sounds came from the center channel of the bar??? But I figure that was some issue with the TV trying to pass a PCM signal from a PCM source)

[Woodsy]

Originally Posted by TravisTylerBlack

My UB820 has been able to play every region B Arrow, Indicator, and Eureka/MOC disc that I've thrown at it via the top menu trick. StudioCanal on the other hand has been a complete no-go apart from the handful of UHDs I have from them. Still need to test my Second Sight and BFI titles.

Love this player so much. The endless customization options have spoiled me. Very much considering purchasing a second as a backup like some users here seem to have done.

The only Second Sight release I have is the new 4k Dawn of the Dead. But just tested the special features bluray disc that's included and it's a negatory. They seem to have disabled the Stop button when sitting at the wrong region screen prompt.

[WKoA13]

Originally Posted by Woodsy

The only Second Sight release I have is the new 4k Dawn of the Dead. But just tested the special features bluray disc that's included and it's a negatory. They seem to have disabled the Stop button when sitting at the wrong region screen prompt.

Thanks for testing/letting us know! Guess I'll have to dust off my cheap region free sony player for that disc (IF my DAWMN set ever shows up...)

[TravisTylerBlack]

Originally Posted by pbz06

Not exactly.

I think Goodfellas is a good example. If I recall, that has metadata of 4,000 nits peak...but literally the entire movie is like around 65 nits max. I forget the exact numbers, but you get the point. So a TV with a non sophisticated tonemapping (static) might compress the entire range which will mean a dark picture even darker...and people complaining how dark the movie is. With the Optimizer, it's sophsticated enough to not touch the image from 0-1000, and most TV's these days don't struggle with 1,000 nits

Goodfellas is an interesting UHD IMO. I think it was Geoff who noted that its overall grading is basically SDR encoded within an HDR container, hence the ultra low nit levels. After switching back and forth during my last viewing a few months ago, the optimizer didn’t seem to make even a slight difference on my X900F. However, the disc did look demonstrably better played through the UB820 than it ever did when spun on my ever-creaky (now junked) Samsung 4K player. Then again, pretty much every disc in my collection looks better with the 820.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by TravisTylerBlack

Goodfellas is an interesting UHD IMO. I think it was Geoff who noted that its overall grading is basically SDR encoded within an HDR container, hence the ultra low nit levels. After switching back and forth during my last viewing a few months ago, the optimizer didn’t seem to make even a slight difference on my X900F. However, the disc did look demonstrably better played through the UB820 than it ever did when spun on my ever-creaky (now junked) Samsung 4K player. Then again, pretty much every disc in my collection looks better with the 820.

With Goodfeathers there are two separate effects in play re: the Optimiser. Technically it shouldn't be doing anything to the image itself on ANY setting, not even the 500 nit Basic one, because the MaxCLL is only 247 nits and that's the value the Optimiser 'looks at' first of all. So even on 500 nits the Optimiser isn't going to touch the signal itself (aside from inducing the mild banding that I see from time to time).

But, as pbz06 sez, the Optimiser also readjusts the metadata when you turn it on which may be of some help to certain TVs. Why? Because some don't look at the MaxCLL for their mapping, they just look at the maximum mastering display level (MDL) and as Goodfeathers is encoded with 4000-nit MDL then it's going to get murdered by the tone mapping.

The highest average brightness (MaxFALL) on the UHD is only 60 nits, right, but if a TV is only looking at the 4000-nit 'container' and it thinks it has to compress the entire range into, say, the 500 nits that the TV can 'natively handle' then it'll knock that 60-nit average brightness down to something stupid like 7.5 nits which is where most the complaints of this looking much too dark and dim stemmed from. Hell, even if the TV is natively 1000 nits it'll still be compressing the range by a factor of four from the 4000-nit 'mastering level', so 60 nits average brightness becomes 15 nits.

"What does that have to do with the Optimiser then?" Well, because it also changes the metadata that's being output (even if it's not changing the actual video signal itself) it means that the TV is now 'seeing' a mastering level of 500/1000/1500 nits depending on where the Optimiser is set and so when the TV applies its own tone mapping it should be far less aggressive in reducing the average brightness. In theory.

But not all TVs tone map like this (thankfully), and some sets like the earlier Sonys ignored all brightness metadata anyway and just presented the content along the proper PQ curve and let it clip where the TV's 'native' brightness abilities ended, thus preserving the proper average brightness on titles like this.

[Kaonashi]

With my B7 I haven’t experienced an excessive amount of clipping. Some Sony Light Cannons had a brightish pinky look to some scenes. The only title which clipped on my TV bad enough to impact viewing was Goblet of Fire. When I get this player I’ll give that a go with the optimiser.

[tama]

[Show spoiler]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

With Goodfeathers there are two separate effects in play re: the Optimiser. Technically it shouldn't be doing anything to the image itself on ANY setting, not even the 500 nit Basic one, because the MaxCLL is only 247 nits and that's the value the Optimiser 'looks at' first of all. So even on 500 nits the Optimiser isn't going to touch the signal itself (aside from inducing the mild banding that I see from time to time).

But, as pbz06 sez, the Optimiser also readjusts the metadata when you turn it on which may be of some help to certain TVs. Why? Because some don't look at the MaxCLL for their mapping, they just look at the maximum mastering display level (MDL) and as Goodfeathers is encoded with 4000-nit MDL then it's going to get murdered by the tone mapping.

The highest average brightness (MaxFALL) on the UHD is only 60 nits, right, but if a TV is only looking at the 4000-nit 'container' and it thinks it has to compress the entire range into, say, the 500 nits that the TV can 'natively handle' then it'll knock that 60-nit average brightness down to something stupid like 7.5 nits which is where most the complaints of this looking much too dark and dim stemmed from. Hell, even if the TV is natively 1000 nits it'll still be compressing the range by a factor of four from the 4000-nit 'mastering level', so 60 nits average brightness becomes 15 nits.

"What does that have to do with the Optimiser then?" Well, because it also changes the metadata that's being output (even if it's not changing the actual video signal itself) it means that the TV is now 'seeing' a mastering level of 500/1000/1500 nits depending on where the Optimiser is set and so when the TV applies its own tone mapping it should be far less aggressive in reducing the average brightness. In theory.

But not all TVs tone map like this (thankfully), and some sets like the earlier Sonys ignored all brightness metadata anyway and just presented the content along the proper PQ curve and let it clip where the TV's 'native' brightness abilities ended, thus preserving the proper average brightness on titles like this.

What's interesting to me is My model TV doesn't seem to look at the 4000 nit container for this title and maps it accordingly. However the US WB Blade Runner 2049 in a 10,000 nit container gets absolutely crushed despite having Max/Average info available.

[pbz06]

Originally Posted by Shalashaska

I wonder if many newer TVs still use such destructive tone mapping? I know LG OLEDs used to compress practically the entire luminance range down, and were probably one of the bigger contributors to the '(specific title in) HDR looks dim' phenomenon, but since 2018, their TVs don't start rolling off by default until about 350 nits even with the most extreme 10,000 nit curve.

If LG addressed it, then it's a good start since LG OLED's sell a lot more. I have a feeling that it's still an issue on the mid-tier TV's that most people buy, because on other forums and groups I'm a part of, I see constant "ZOMG! dolby vision is so mucH beTterZZ!!11 than vanilla HDRz!!". To me, that says their TV's don't properly assess metadata or they're just spewing confirmation/suggestion bias out the a$$. The way I see it, the differences should be within the margins since the TV would have the same constraints in terms of color gamut coverage, color volume, greyscale etc whether it's HDR10 or DV, so the only differences would really come down to tonemapping (static vs dynamic) luminance.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by tama

What's interesting to me is My model TV doesn't seem to look at the 4000 nit container for this title and maps it accordingly. However the US WB Blade Runner 2049 in a 10,000 nit container gets absolutely crushed despite having Max/Average info available.

I wonder if it's got some special protocol for 10k nit mastering display metadata, i.e. their thinking is that if it's present then it must've been intentionally mastered that way and it overrides the MaxCLL? Of all the movies to do that on, Warners chose the one that barely nudges 200 nits peak and is the epitome of SDR in an HDR container. Which, BTW, was also the source of quite a few "it's too dark, the Dolby Vision stream looks far better!" complaints when it came out.

Some people still say that aboot the DV stream now and even though I shouldn't speak without seeing it for myself, it's my belief that the DV stream is the exact same grade as the HDR10, it's just not being wrecked by the tone mapping and/or poor processing of dark/near-black gradations that seems to plague some displays. [edit] Which I see pbz06 also subscribes to, from looking at what was posted while I was typing.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Shalashaska

I wonder if many newer TVs still use such destructive tone mapping? I know LG OLEDs used to compress practically the entire luminance range down, and were probably one of the bigger contributors to the '(specific title in) HDR looks dim' phenomenon, but since 2018, their TVs don't start rolling off by default until about 350 nits even with the most extreme 10,000 nit curve.

Agreed, we've definitely seen a big reduction in these kinds of complaints, though not an eradication, because the tone mapping has got betterer on new displays, and the more widespread usage of dynamic metadata on discs since that time is also ensuring a more consistent experience (Dolby bugs aside e.g. greybar syndrome).

Originally Posted by pbz06

If LG addressed it, then it's a good start since LG OLED's sell a lot more. I have a feeling that it's still an issue on the mid-tier TV's that most people buy, because on other forums and groups I'm a part of, I see constant "ZOMG! dolby vision is so mucH beTterZZ!!11 than vanilla HDRz!!". To me, that says their TV's don't properly assess metadata or they're just spewing confirmation/suggestion bias out the a$$. The way I see it, the differences should be within the margins since the TV would have the same constraints in terms of color gamut coverage, color volume, greyscale etc whether it's HDR10 or DV, so the only differences would really come down to tonemapping (static vs dynamic) luminance.

I don't actually doubt that most of the ZOMG crowd are seeing what they're seeing, but as you say it stems partly from all the DV hype/ignorance and partly from the display badly handling the HDR10 source instead of the DV providing a vastly different grade at source. People don't realise that the vast majority of HDR10 discs from the major studios have been downconverted FROM the initial Dobly master, not that differences can't occur in that process but the grade is done, there's no need to drastically alter it again for the HDR10.

Stacey Spears mentioned that the Montage on the UHD Benchmark was graded to pretty much be a torture test for HDR mapping which is why it goes up to like 5000+ nits, but IIRC he said that when doing the trim passes for the DV metadata they barely had to touch it for the 2000-nit downconvert and even the 1000-nit version didn't need extensive tweaking, it was more the 600-nit HDR and 100-nit SDR passes that required the most work to downconvert properly.

[Ray Jackson]

What’s the best 4K player that can be got for $200 or less?

...is Panasonic generally better than Sony?

[kevers7290]

Originally Posted by Ray Jackson

What’s the best 4K player that can be got for $200 or less?

...is Panasonic generally better than Sony?

For <$200 I would go with the Panasonic UB420, but if you want Dolby Vision you'll need to shell out a tad more for the UB820.

[Ray Jackson]

Originally Posted by kevers7290

For <$200 I would go with the Panasonic UB420, but if you want Dolby Vision you'll need to shell out a tad more for the UB820.

Is the PQ dramatically better with Dolby, than without?

I should point out that I probably won’t be getting a 4K tv for a while.

...I’m transitioning in stages.

[Paul.R.S]

Originally Posted by Ray Jackson

Is the PQ dramatically better with Dolby, than without?

I should point out that I probably won’t be getting a 4K tv for a while.

...I’m transitioning in stages.

What's your viewing diet like? I find there's a lot of DV fetishism out t/here. Unless you are planning to either seek out new release UHD BDs that have DV or have/plan to get AppleTV 4K, I don't necessarily think DV should be a top three consideration.

I mention AppleTV because there is currently a lot of content on that platform in DV that's not available in DV on UHD BD if on UHD BD at all. I personally am keeping an eye on MGM titles: Rocky and all the pre-Daniel Craig Bonds are on AppleTV with DV but of course there are no UHD BDs for any of those.

But I personally am not currently interested in buying an AppleTV 4K. So that's just one example of how important looking at your own viewing diet is. Even if PQ is supposedly better, has the stuff you watch (deep catalog vs. new theatricals; indie vs. big studio; music titles and docs vs. feature films) even been released in DV?

Another factor for your is what your timetable is for buying a 4K display. The landscape as far as DV-encoding is concerned could be different in, say, 18 months.

[Disclaimer: I recently went through a significant bout of considering all these factors for myself in connection with buying a new display. I got an 85" Sammy QLED. No DV for me.]