Panasonic the new Oppo?

Panasonic’s recent Sydney launch of TV and AV products included an advance Christmas present for those mourning the imminent departure of Oppo’s optical disc players. Only days after Oppo Digital announced it would be ceasing all production of its awardwinning Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray players (and its well-regarded head-fi range), with enough production only to see out most of 2017, Panasonic detailed the high-end specs of its own “reference-class” UHD Blu-ray player, the DP-UB9000 (above). This looks every bit the upmarket player, and Panasonic Australia’s Aaron Waters confirmed that it pays equal attention to audio quality as to video quality, with separate power supplies for the analogue audio section, in addition to a newly-developed vibration-reducing chassis, and a new drive base with a 3-dimensional thick steel plate, plus highperformance DACs, and XLR balanced audio outputs.

It will, of course, also play conventional Blu-rays, DVDs and CDs in addition to the UHD Blu-ray format, for which it will be THX-certified, and includes the latest version of Panasonic’s own HCX (Hollywood Color eXperience) processor, as also used in the new FZ series of OLED televisions. In addition to careful attention to chroma subsampling, the HCX processor now has completely new Dynamic Look Up Tables for colour accuracy, using an algorithm that monitors the average brightness level of a scene to dynamically load an LUT appropriate to that scene.

Panasonic claims this brings significant improvements to midbrightness scenes, making them look much more natural. Panasonic has also included additional layers of LUT data at much darker levels than previously, improving colour accuracy in dark areas.

The UB9000 will support HDR10, HDR10+ (the nascent 10-bit version of High Dynamic Range with dynamic metadata), Dolby Vision (12-bit depth and dynamic metadata), and a host of HDR options, including HDR-to-SDR conversion while maintaining Rec.2020 colour output.

Its arrival is promised for the last quarter of 2018, and while no pricing was given at the recent Sydney launch, UK pricing has been announced at UK 999.

Of course, we’ve been much impressed by what Panasonic does at a lower level with UHD Blu-ray, as you can read in our review of the DMR-UBT1 on p24 this issue. Meanwhile the DMP-UB400 is the current holder of Sound+Image Blu-ray Player of the Year under $500, and the UB300 is no slouch either, and outstanding value (we’ve seen it as low as $230). These two models will be superseded by three new UHD Blu-ray players before the arrival of the UB9000: • DP-UB820: due July 2018, $659; • DP-UB420: due June 2018, $449; and • DP-UB320: due July 2018, $329.

And from the DP-UB420 upwards, the players will support voice control from Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, initially for fast forward and pause, with more as the various systems allow. All models will also play high-res audio (WAV, FLAC, ALAC, AIFF and DSD up to 11.2MHz – or 5.6 MHz on the UB320).

We hope they’ll also keep whatever circuit makes the current Panasonic players so extraordinarily good at upscaling Australian DVDs! More information: www.panasonic.com.au