Panasonic's first 4K Blu-ray player, the DMP-UB900, promises to usher in a whole new era of high-end home entertainment! For home cinema fans this is a big deal! In this video I unpack my review sample and share some first impressions.
The Panasonic UB400 4K Blu-ray player reviewed…
The Panasonic DMP-UB900 is positioned above Samsung’s rival K8500 4K Blu-ray player in both price and spec. It is THX 4K Source certified and has UHD premium status too. The chassis is full width, half depth, with a drop down translucent fascia. Chamfered edges blend into the main body. It's a nice looking box, but isn’t quite as impressive as the best players from Oppo, Cambridge or Pioneer.
1.58: Connections include two HDMI outputs. Most users will simply route the Video/Audio output into an AV receiver that offers 4K HDMI support. Those with a non 4K AV receiver should link the player directly to the screen, leaving the second HDMI output to deliver multichannel audio to the receiver.
2.22: There’s also a full 7.1 analogue output bank, plus stereo phono pair, and optical and coaxial digital ouputs. In addition to Ethernet, dual band Wi-Fi is available. On the front is a USB port and SD card reader.
The user interface is good. The main Home page offers buttons for Video, Music, Photos, Home Network and Network Services, a content portal which features YouTube, Netflix and Amazon Instant Video apps, both 4K ready. In addition (ojn the UK player at least) there's BBC iPlayer, BBC News and Sport, MySpace, DailyMotion and a load of other junk you'll never want to watch.
3.19: The DLNA client quickly found compatible media servers on my network and codec support is extensive. MKVs play fine, as do MP4, MOV and MPEG2. The deck will even play DSD 64 5.1 multichannel, as well as AAC, ALAC, FLAC, MP3, WAV and WMA. This is also very fine CD player in its own right. The deck's 192kHz upconversion is outstanding.
Picture quality is stunning, with beautifully smooth colour gradations, loads of detail and extraordinary dynamics. Make sure your HDR is correctly configured to display HDR images from this player. You may need to manually assign your HDMI inputs for HDR or manually select the correct colour space (probably BT2020 in the menu). These players are not plug and play, which is a bit of an issue.
5.39: An adjustable dynamic range control is available for screens which are not HDR enabled. There’s a sliding scale of adjustment, variable between -12 and +12.
If you hook the UB900 up to a non-4K TV, 4K discs will play back in 1080p resolution (provided the studios allow it). I tried it with San Andreas. While the player prompts you to load the regular Blu-ray, the downscaled 4K version actually looks very good. Overall, an impressive machine, but expect teething problems with certain player/TV combinations.
Subscribe To My Channel And Never Miss A Review Or Unboxing
http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=SteveMayUK
Follow me on Twitter: @SteveMay_UK
