New Panasonic 4K UHD Blu Ray Player Has No Equal
When it comes to top end entertainment gear you have to rank Panasonic as being up there with the best and this is no more evident than with their new top end Ultra High Definition 4K UB900 which while expensive is already in short supply in Australia.
The UB900 is essentially the ultimate Blu ray player out there.
Ultra HD Blu-ray, for those new to all this, is the next-generation of Blu-ray that supports 4K and High Dynamic Range (HDR) – a new standard for colour and picture brightness and promises a whole new dimension of colour and contrast.
The UB900 costs $848 versus $596 at JB Hi Fi, for the Samsung UBD-K8500 deck, and sports a number of premium audio and video features which Panasonic reckons will enable it to unlock UHD Blu-ray’s full potential.
That’s a pretty bold claim. So has Panasonic really got it right first time? That’ll be a yes.
DESIGN AND FEATURES
The UB900 sets a suitably premium tone right from the off, thanks to an eye-catchingly glamorous design and impressive build quality. The top plate has an appealing brushed metallic finish, while the fascia is fronted by a drop-down smoked-glass-effect cover that does a sharp job of hiding the UB900’s disc tray, along with frontmounted USB and SD card slots.
Overall, the UB900 presents a much more handsome face to the world than the slightly clumsy and plasticky look of Samsung’s K8500 deck. This, at least, explains some of the difference in price, though my in-depth tech overview later on explains the real reasons.
The SD card slot and USB port can be used for playing video, photo and music files through the UB900 on your TV/AV audio system, while connections on the deck’s rear include 7.1-channel analogue audio outputs and two HDMI outputs – one capable of delivering both pictures and sound to a TV; the other designed to ship audio only to a compatible AV receiver.
The main HDMI is built to the v2.0a HDMI specification, and if you want to experience the full picture quality potential the UHD BD format has to offer, you’ll need a TV equipped with v2.0a inputs. The UB900’s HDMI sockets introduce one of the deck’s premium features. Panasonic’s designed them so that if the deck detects audio being output through the secondary HDMI, it’ll automatically turn off the audio part of the main HDMI output, reducing the potential for interference between the audio and video signals.
Panasonic’s bid to minimise interference in the audio and video paths doesn’t stop there, though.
The UB900 can also automatically turn off its connection circuitry for its coaxial, optical and analogue audio output ports if they’re not being used. Or if the deck detects you’re listening to music rather than watching a video disc, it can completely turn off its video circuitry as well as any audio outputs you’re not using.
Joining this unexpected ability to divide the labour of the UB900’s electronics is its ability to upscale CDs to 192kHz, and a seriously ‘Hi-Fi’ roster of internal audio components. For the sake of your sanity I won’t list them in full, but experience suggests that the sort of gear the UB900 is fitted with across its analogue, digital and power supply sections should deliver tangible sonic benefits, particularly when it comes to bass depth, timing, detail, clarity and simple musicality.
To underline this point, the UB900 features a ‘Sound Effects’ menu with options to resample audio to suit specific music types (jazz, pop/ rock and classical). There are even six ‘Digital Tube’ pre-sets designed to recreate the sort of sound you might expect from an old vacuum tube amp.
The UB900 can play CD, DVD, and HD/3D Blu-ray discs, though I guess you could feel a bit disappointed given its clear interest in audio quality that its disc compatibility doesn’t extend to SACD or DVD-Audio discs. However, the player can handle high-resolution audio file formats (including FLAC and DSD) delivered via NAS drives or USB sticks, which is more important these days.
The fact that I’ve spent so long discussing the audio features of a Blu-ray player speaks volumes about just how far Panasonic has gone to make this a truly premium product. Yes, it’s an Ultra HD Blu-ray player, but Panasonic’s squeezing out as much value as possible. It’s not just a disc player but a serious piece of AV gear for all your needs.
Obviously, the UB900 delivers the basic Ultra HD Blu-ray requirements of 4K/UHD resolution – high dynamic range (HDR) and an expanded colour gamut. But for the UB900 that’s just the start, with Panasonic’s engineers identifying three key picture quality areas where they believe they can make a difference.
First, since Ultra HD Blu-ray only mandates chroma sampling at the 4:2:0 standard, it needs to be up sampled to 4:4:4 to deliver the best results on high-quality TVs.
Second, since Ultra HD Blu-rays carry 10-bit video masters, the player ought to be capable of delivering more than 10-bit accuracy to deliver optimal performance.
Finally, since not all TVs support every aspect of Ultra HD Blu-ray’s video feast – not actually 4K, or no support for HDR or the BT.2020 colour ‘container’ – an Ultra HD Blu-ray player needs to be able to automatically recognise a TV’s limitations and convert the UHD BD video signal into something the TV can handle.
Panasonic’s chroma up sampling system, delivered via the brand’s proprietary new 4K High-Precision Chroma Processor, is the most exciting of the UB900’s video innovations, as it works to improve Ultra HD Blu-ray’s 4K HDR experience.
The UB900’s Chroma Processor replaces the typical ‘two-tap’ chroma filter with a multi-tap one that delivers colours more accurately, and then applies unique edge adaptive processing to reduce colour errors even more. The result should be ultra-crisp edges within the image and, as a result, an increased perception of sharpness.
This run down of the UB900’s features might seem a little bewildering, but these are the sort of waters you’re operating in when you’re tackling the high-end of the brave new 4K/ HDR video world.
With so many picture and sound quality features at its disposal, it’s really no surprise that the UB900 has been certified for its 4K video and audio performance by the independent THX quality-assurance programme.
It’s also earned the Ultra HD Premium badge of honour from the AV industry’s Ultra HD Alliance, showing that it managed to pass a series of tests designed by the UHDA to assure consumers that it’s a product capable of delivering an uncompromised and uncompromising 4K HDR video performance.
One last handy feature to mention here is that the UB900 carries a selection of ‘smart TV’ apps, including Netflix iView and several other local services. I’ve already looked at and been pretty excited by Samsung’s cheaper K8500 Ultra HD Blu-ray deck. With the Panasonic UB900, though, this excitement switches to slack-jawed amazement, as the deck’s numerous high-end touches combine to deliver picture quality that’s explosively good.
The deck’s colour reproduction from every Ultra HD Blu-ray disc was never less than extraordinary. The range of tones on show not only goes far beyond anything possible with normal HD Blu-rays, but also outguns the efforts of Samsung’s K8500.
Saturation is even richer than on the Samsung player too, and it doesn’t take long flicking between K8500 and UB900 4K HDR feeds to see that the UB900’s colour boundaries look slightly crisper than those of the K8500.
This in turn makes the UB900’s Ultra HD Blu-ray images look noticeably sharper and more detailed than those of the K8500 – which is saying something, given how blown away I was by the Samsung’s 4K efforts.
In fact, it’s important to stress that the K8500’s picture quality is not poor in any way – it’s actually surprisingly good for such an affordable product working in such a new AV area. It’s just that the UB900’s premium approach yields results that are even more dazzling