PANASONIC DP-UB9000

It’s four times the price of the LG on the previous pages. But if you want full control of video and audio, this may be your player.

In Australia we often don’t see the full product range from the consumer electronics giants. Sometimes they make audiophile and videophile products... but then market them only in their home market, or perhaps North America. The Panasonic DP-UB9000 UHD Blu-ray player gives us a taste of what we so often miss out on, for it is an unabashedly high-end product. And, happily, this is one that is available here.

Equipment

While I might have seemed down in the intro to these two reviews regarding the future of Blu-ray, I should note that Panasonic seems up. The DP-UB9000 is just one of four Ultra-HD models it has available. The others range in price from $279 to $659. So, thank you Panasonic!

This award-winning model packs in nearly every feature that you can think of, except support for older disc standards. It will play CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs and UHD Blu-ray discs (and it has UltraHD Premium certification for that last one). It also supports Blu-ray 3D playback, should you still have a display which can present in 3D. But it will not play SACDs or DVD-Audio discs, nor Video CDs.

The Panasonic DP-UB9000 is a large and heavy player, as it should be. While most UHD players are typically 1.5kg or 2.0kg, this is nearly 9kg. Its drawer is smooth and it has an actual front-panel display, something that has been disappearing from players in recent times. There are also basic controls on the front panel, along with a USB 2.0 socket for media playback.

At the back are two HDMI outputs, one of them for audio, the other for video or video plus audio. The audio-only one is useful for those who have a slightly older AV receiver which might not accept audio that is mixed in with UHD signals.

Indeed, this player caters very well for audio. It also offers both optical and coaxial digital outputs. And 7.1 channels of analogue outputs. Plus it has two sets of stereo analogue audio outputs: one pair on RCA sockets and one pair of balanced XLR sockets.

There’s another USB socket on the back — this one is USB 3.0 — along with Ethernet and a Wi-Fi module. And the remote control is fairly large and well-laden with control keys.

Setting up

There has been a trend for years towards simplification of equipment. The idea is that interfaces and options shouldn’t be daunting, and that operation should be intuitive. Nice idea! Too often this has been combined with the shedding of features. But not here. Looking through the set-up menus here, I found a number of options rarely seen these days, but ones which have real value.

For example, this player has something called ‘Still Mode’ in the picture settings menu. All high quality DVD players used to have this. So what is it?

Remember, video on DVD is interlaced. When you pause playback, the player has to decide whether it’s going to show one field of the frame, or weave both fields together into the full frame. If the content is video-sourced (so the two fields come from slightly different moments of time), it should do the former. If film-sourced (where both fields are derived from the one frame) it should do the latter.

How’s the player to know which it is? When deinterlacing during playback, it can examine the video and looks for tell-tale signs of combing. But in still mode? Not so easy. So it relies on the interlaced/progressive flag embedded in the data on the disc.

So all’s fine, right? Um, no. The problem is that this flag is sometimes wrong. In fact with PAL DVDs, it’s almost always wrong! Last time I checked — admittedly a few years ago, now — the great majority of Australian movie DVDs were incorrectly flagged ‘interlaced’ when they are in fact progressive. Press ‘pause’ when one of those is playing and what you’ll get is one field — a mere 288 lines of vertical resolution, rather than the full frame. (I still keep one old otherwise-useless DVD player, simply because it reports on this flag.)

With this Panasonic you can set ‘Still mode’ to ‘Frame’ and be sure you’ll get full resolution.

Here’s another bonus: you can configure the digital audio output to bitstream or PCM conversion separately for Dolby and its variants, DTS and its variants, and MPEG audio. (For Australia and Europe, MPEG is an allowable audio standard on DVDs.)

You can ignore all that stuff if you want to keep things simple. The defaults are sensible. But if you like to get in there and control things, well, this is the player for you.

Those separate 7.1-channel audio outputs offer versatility for those who need it, though really, I can’t see many people using them given the HDMI connections. And you’d still need some kind of pre-amplifier because the player output volume can’t be controlled. For those who do wish to use them, there are facilities for setting the output level for each of the 7.1 channels, plus the delay (in milliseconds, so you’ll have to measure and calculate) for each speaker pair, but not the subwoofer. You can also set the size for each speaker, or switch all but the front stereo pair off. There is no support in this output set for things like height channels. To get full audio value from UHD, it’s best to go with a proper home theatre decoder in a receiver or amplifier.

Oh, and one last thing. If your TV supports Dolby Vision, go the settings menu and switch it on in the player. I’m embarrassed to admit that I forgot this and had to ask Panasonic to confirm that the player really did support it. My TV was reporting only HDR. But once I switched it on, all was fine. Panasonic says that the player also supports HDR+ and HLG.

Disc playback

Playback of all supported media was simply unimpeachable. Decoding of all forms of video was excellent, presumably aided by Panasonic’s HCX Processor.

One thing I’d like to highlight was the deinterlacing performance. It handled all my test clips perfectly. Let me be clear about that: both with 576i/50 and 1080i/50, all my most problematic film-sourced content was properly handled as film-sourced all the way through. Not once did the player inappropriately slip back into a treatment suitable for video-sourced material. Furthermore, it switched instantly between the two modes as required.

So I’d happily stick with ‘Automatic’. But if something is worth doing, it’s worth over-doing. This player overdoes it. Press the ‘Option’ button during disc playback, tap down to the picture settings and then you can select the progressive-scan mode: Automatic, Film or Video. The Film mode is a true forced mode. So if you ever do come across something that does manage to trick the auto mode, this player can handle it.

“Too often the trend towards simplification of equipment has been combined with the shedding of features. But not here. “

The player was quick to load discs and quite responsive to the remote control commands. One thing I especially liked was the ‘Playback Info’ display. This shows the video and audio standards of the disc being played, along with the video and audio bit-rate. Press it twice and you can see the HDR settings — maximum NITs and whatnot. Nerd that I am, this is stuff that I love!

There are five fast-forwards and five fastreverse speeds. There are also five slow speeds, although only forwards works for Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray. Likewise, you can single-step both ways for DVD, but only forwards for BD and UHD BD.

Network

When it comes to network support, this player exists in two eras. For local network functionality, its interface looks reasonably modern. That stuff all comes under the ‘Home Network’ option in the Home menu.

But for the broader Internet — ‘Network Service’ from the Home menu — the player is very 2009. Perhaps older. I can’t remember how far back this interface goes, but this layout has been used on Panasonic Blu-ray players for many years. It displays a set of nine boxes on the screen, each containing a service (it’s shown on the TV image above), with an option to dig into additional pages. On the front page is Netflix (there’s a key for that on the remote as well), ABC iView, SBS On Demand, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Telstra TV Box Office and a web browser. Further down are some other bits and pieces, including some kids’ stuff. I doubt users will spend much time in that, and to be fair, many will be using this with a TV or other equipment that duplicates these functions (and probably does them better). I remain perplexed why Panasonic doesn’t use its fine Firefox OS in these kinds of smart products. Apart from anything else, that would mean one less set of apps to maintain.

The other part of network support — the local network part — is much better. This player has, for example, just been upfdated to wotrk with the Control4

The unit supports Wi-Di or Mirrorcast... at least I think so. Everyone uses their own name for these functions so the only way to be certain it’s working is by trying to connect. So I tried ‘Wireless projection’ on my Huawei phone. Success. I tried ‘Project’ on my Windows tablet. Success. So Mirrorcast it is.

The Wi-Fi connection is dual-band and supports every standard up to 802.11ac, so it will be about as fast as your home network permits. The Ethernet connection supports up to 1000BASE-T, in other words a gigabit connection. By way of confirmation, it played both my 100Mbps and 200Mbps test videos without stuttering. Even the 100Mbps stutters with 100BASE-T connections.

The easiest way to use its local network playback capabilities is to treat the unit as a DLNA renderer (with support for audio, video and still photos). I used BubbleUPnP on my Android devices to send media to the Panasonic player. It worked reliably every time. Both video and photos were shown with full Ultra-HD resolution, including colour resolution.

High resolution audio with up to 192kHz sampling was supported, as well as DSD. In fact, it was more advanced DSD than most devices because it supported DSD

5.1 surround sound — it converts it to 5.1-channel PCM at 88.2kHz sampling, but I suspect that’s a wise move. Lots of equipment wouldn’t support DSD 5.1 inputs over HDMI. As for two-channel DSD, it supports double and quadruple speed versions — they’re DSD128 and DSD256 — in addition to the standard DSD64. Those with high-quality hi-fi can enjoy the balanced outputs with this.

Conclusion

That dated internet streaming interface aside, the Panasonic DP-UB9000 Ultra-HD Blu-ray player is a wonderful unit for spinning discs, and also very solid when it comes to feeding network media to it. It is Awards-worthy performance indeed. Stephen Dawson