New 4K blu ray players

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by fredreed

Will we see any new updated 4K blu ray players at all this year with better hardware inside them? All I have been hearing are that the current 4K blu ray players models are junk because of the hardware?

At this point, I don't think there is anything you can do to make UHD Blu-ray players better than they are today.

[CatBus]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

At this point, I don't think there is anything you can do to make UHD Blu-ray players better than they are today.

This. 1080p Blu-ray players had this upgrade cycle to them because the Blu-ray discs were always using new authoring tricks for various things (e.g. using crazy amounts of seamless branching as a form of copy protection, etc). Old players would choke on them, and require updates. Sometimes just firmware, but sometimes also hardware as well.

Now it seems (hopefully) that all of the stupid authoring tricks have played out. A first-gen UHD player can still play pretty much everything you throw at it. I have an Oppo BDP-203 and haven't yet encountered a disc it won't play. Hasn't even had a firmware update in years. I also have a bottom-tier Sony, and the rare issues I've had with it have all eventually been resolved with firmware updates.

So if a new hardware model is released, it'll probably not really be to make the player better. It'll be because some part is no longer available and the manufacturer needs to switch components. They may include updated versions of their streaming apps too. But the core player functionality will likely be as identical as possible. Why change something that works?

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by CatBus

This. 1080p Blu-ray players had this upgrade cycle to them because the Blu-ray discs were always using new authoring tricks for various things (e.g. using crazy amounts of seamless branching as a form of copy protection, etc). Old players would choke on them, and require updates. Sometimes just firmware, but sometimes also hardware as well.

Now it seems (hopefully) that all of the stupid authoring tricks have played out. A first-gen UHD player can still play pretty much everything you throw at it. I have an Oppo BDP-203 and haven't yet encountered a disc it won't play. Hasn't even had a firmware update in years. I also have a bottom-tier Sony, and the rare issues I've had with it have all eventually been resolved with firmware updates.

So if a new hardware model is released, it'll probably not really be to make the player better. It'll be because some part is no longer available and the manufacturer needs to switch components. They may include updated versions of their streaming apps too. But the core player functionality will likely be as identical as possible. Why change something that works?

My 2010 Samsung BD-C6800 still plays the latest discs.

[Jodi]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

At this point, I don't think there is anything you can do to make UHD Blu-ray players better than they are today.

I have the Panasonic UB9000p1k (MK II), and I could not agree with you more. This player has been out for 4 years now, and there is simply no equal!!

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Jodi

I have the Panasonic UB9000p1k (MK II), and I could not agree with you more. This player has been out for 4 years now, and there is simply no equal!!

I got mine beginning of last year, so I don't think it's the second version. I actually bought it as "Scratch & Dent" from Crutchfield, and it doesn't have any scratches or dents! It was brand new, never turned on, and loaded up to the initial setup the first time I turned it on.

[Jodi]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

I got mine beginning of last year, so I don't think it's the second version. I actually bought it as "Scratch & Dent" from Crutchfield, and it doesn't have any scratches or dents! It was brand new, never turned on, and loaded up to the initial setup the first time I turned it on.

Glad you were able to fire that puppy up!

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by Jodi

I have the Panasonic UB9000p1k (MK II), and I could not agree with you more. This player has been out for 4 years now, and there is simply no equal!!

A $1000 4K disc player that can't play a DVD anywhere near as well as a $70 blu-ray player, can't play a SACD, and that can't play a wide variety of common video files has no equal? There are 4K disc players that cost a fraction as much that can do all of the above with ease.

Geoff D puts it best:

Originally Posted by Geoff D

These Pannys are excellent spinners for BD and UHD but my word they are hot garbage for DVD.

Originally Posted by Geoff D

A potato would be better than the Panny for file playback, lol

[LordoftheRings]

Originally Posted by Vilya

A $1000 4K disc player that can't play a DVD anywhere near as well as a $70 blu-ray player, can't play a SACD, and that can't play a wide variety of common video files has no equal?

There are 4K disc players that cost a fraction as much that can do all of the above with ease.

DVD? You still play those? The first Oppo Universal DVD players were the best.
Check on eBay.

The Panasonic 9000 is not for people with large collection of SACDs ...
▪︎https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...-review.14324/

Optimize your life, get a 4K BR Oppo on eBay (203-05), or a Panny 9000 (or an 820-24 in plastic).

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by LordoftheRings

DVD? You still play those?

Yeah, you may have noticed that I still have a couple laying around. Not everything has made it to blu-ray, yet alone 4K.

I just expect a $1000 machine that markets itself to be backwards compatible (like all 4K disc players) to be able to do as least as good a job with DVD playback as a blu-ray player that costs 7% as much.

The Pannys can play SACD files via a USB device, but for some ridiculous reason can not play a SACD disc itself. It makes no damn sense.

A player that costs a $1000 should be able to do everything that a far cheaper player can do..and even do it far better.

As for Oppos, I have a 93 and a 203. What I would like to see is a worthy successor not just in terms of quality and versatility, but also in customer service. Oppo stopped production a few years ago, but to this day they still offer the best customer service and support of any consumer electronics company that I have ever done business with.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Vilya

A $1000 4K disc player that can't play a DVD anywhere near as well as a $70 blu-ray player, can't play a SACD, and that can't play a wide variety of common video files has no equal? There are 4K disc players that cost a fraction as much that can do all of the above with ease.

Geoff D puts it best:

Whenever I play a DVD-Video I always set the player to 480p so my display can upscale the video.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

Whenever I play a DVD-Video I always set the player to 480p so my display can upscale the video.

That doesn't solve the problem as I believe has already been explained to you.

Originally Posted by Geoff D

That's the problem though: the Pannysonics don't present an unmolested 480i output that the TV can then upscale, it'll only go down to 480p and this still bakes in their cack-handed deinterlacing no matter what you do. I even tried forcing a 1080i output to see if that would help but nope, it's just re-interlacing the already-deinterlaced (and jaggy AF) signal. If the Pannys had a proper source direct mode then we wouldn't be having this discussion.

[LordoftheRings]

There must be cheap DVD players that are adept @ good DVD playback performance, no?

* Which 4K Blu-ray player today has the best DVD playback?

Last time I played one of those must have been before the turn of this new century ... 2006, sixteen years ago? It's been a very long time anyway ... a decade or so.
I retired my Toshiba DVD player (SD-3107 with a headphone jack/dedicated volume control) way back then.

Today try to find a 4K BR player with a headphone jack. ...Same for a phone.
It's like a slap in the face.

Too many good flicks not enough time.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by LordoftheRings

There must be cheap DVD players that are adept @ good DVD playback performance, no?

* Which 4K Blu-ray player today has the best DVD playback?

Last time I played one of those must have been before the turn of this new century ... 2006, sixteen years ago? It's been a very long time anyway ... a decade or so.
I retired my Toshiba DVD player (SD-3107 with a headphone jack/dedicated volume control) way back then.

Today try to find a 4K BR player with a headphone jack. ...Same for a phone.
It's like a slap in the face.

Too many good flicks not enough time.

Want to play your UHD Blu-ray discs through your headphones? Just plug them into your display and set the output to be variable.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by LordoftheRings

There must be cheap DVD players that are adept @ good DVD playback performance, no?

* Which 4K Blu-ray player today has the best DVD playback?

The point isn't that there are no good "cheap DVD players."

The point is that a $1000 Panasonic 4K disc player should be able to play a DVD as good or better than any other disc player priced as much or less than itself. I don't want to have to use a separate player to get the best from each format; I expect a backwards compatible 4K disc player that costs four figures to do an excellent job with all supported disc formats. It's not an unreasonable expectation.

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by LordoftheRings

Today try to find a 4K BR player with a headphone jack. ...Same for a phone.
It's like a slap in the face.

Get a Topping DX3 Pro+.

[BijouMan]

Originally Posted by Vilya

That doesn't solve the problem as I believe has already been explained to you.

Nevertheless, DVDs seem to look better than I have ever seen them, even my personal DVDs.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by BijouMan

Nevertheless, DVDs seem to look better than I have ever seen them, even my personal DVDs.

You must be easy to please is all that I can say. Look at the images that Geoff posted comparing how a DVD looked on an Oppo 203 vs. a Panasonic 820:

Originally Posted by Geoff D

The crazy thing is that the Pannys ace the DVD test patterns like CUE and the chroma multibursts and cadence detection and whatnot, I mean they look perfick, far better than they do on the OPPO 203. But the jaggies test pattern gives it away, the swinging bar is jagged as hell on all the angles as it swings back and forth and when you play real world content it's right there too, it's like the upsampling engine is so intent on REBUILDING THE CHROMA, MUST REBUILD THE CHROMA!!! that it ignores the niceties like halfway decent deinterlacing...which kinda sucks when dealing with a format that is literally always stored as interlaced material.

This is totally and utterly unscientific but below are some crappy cellphone photos of the Hockey clip from the Spears & Munsil DVD included with the HD Benchmark disc. This is a piece designed to be a torture test, shot on what looks like Video8 tape or something and it's grotty as hell, right, but what any competent deinterlacer should be doing is rendering the diagonals as smoothly as possible. Instead the Panny 820 makes the hockey sticks look like they've been half-inched from Minecraft and no, I'm not being hyperbolic.

Again: these are terrible cellphone photos (something I don't normally do, I use an actual camera camera) so ignore things like the colour tinting, moiré from the screen, visible clumps of pixels, and just look at the hockey stick the kid is holding. Same frame on each. Nicely smooth on the OPPO 203, jagged AF on the 820. There's more ringing on the Panny with the default video settings too. And this is nothing to do with only displaying fields when paused or whatever, this is exactly how it looks in motion as well. And also no, it's not because "the source is shit" or whatever, this manifests in day to day viewing with whatever 480i content I dare to watch on it (which isn't often).

Panny 820




OPPO 203



PS

Just one more thing: the Pannys also have a bug when playing SD content stored on a Blu-ray, again it's very badly jagged and even the test patterns show it, e.g. https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...5#post14660725. This is something that even David Mackenzie documented.

The hockey stick don't lie.