#Region free blu ray player reviews tv#

The Dynamic Range Adjustment could also be helpful to a lesser extent. Tone Curve (Black) helped bring out shadow detail on discs that looked a bit dark. This menu also offers several other controls that I sometimes found useful. To then enable the player's tone mapping based on your display type, you enter the Optimum HDR Adjustment menu (accessible directly via the Video Setting button on the player's thankfully backlit remote control) and turn on the HDR Optimizer.

#Region free blu ray player reviews tv#

But by using the Panasonic player's High Luminance Projector setting, which maps to 500 nits, the TV was freed up from doing any tone mapping at all. That's because the OLED setting tone maps to a maximum light level of 1,000 nits, while Sony's A9G TV clips at about 565 nits and has its own dynamic tone mapping. For example, with the Sony XBR-65A9G OLED TV I used for my review, the Panasonic's High Luminance Projector option worked slightly better than the OLED one. The most appropriate option isn't always an obvious choice, though the visible differences can be subtle. These are located deep in Player Settings menu: two for projectors, three for LCD TVs, and one for OLED TVs. The DP-UB9000 offers a range of six peak white settings (two more than the DP-UB820 provides) that correspond to the light output capabilities of your display.

Since the metadata specifying peak luminance on a disc can sometimes be inadequate or wrong, the Panasonic ignores it and generates its own metadata. Metadata on the disc tells the set to 'remap' the HDR data to meet the set's capabilities, minimizing peak white clipping while still taking some advantage of bright highlight detail the set can't otherwise deal with. As Kris Deering noted in his DP-UB820 review, since many Ultra HD discs are mastered at a higher peak luminance level than most displays can handle, a process called tone mapping is used for HDR playback. The Panasonic supports the HDR10, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and HLG HDR formats. That said, most DP-UB9000 owners will feed their AVR or pre-pro via a digital audio connection from the player, rendering the feature irrelevant.

This is typically fixed in most digital gear, though some audiophiles like to have selectable options. These are available only from the analog outputs and modify the slope of the high frequency cutoff required by any digital audio source. But the player's variable Analog Output Filter presets (Sharp, Slow, Short Delay, Super Slow) might be of interest. The DP-UB9000 includes a number of unique audio features, many of them simply offering frequency response tweaks that most users will ignore. In addition to its two HDMI outputs (there's no HDMI input) and two USB ports (2.0 on the front, 3.0 on the back), the player sports 7.1 analog audio, balanced and unbalanced stereo analog audio, and optical and coaxial digital audio outputs. That said, some users may be put off to learn that format support doesn't extend to Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio. It's compatible with a wide assortment of disc formats, including Blu-ray 3D. The THX-certified DP-UB9000's appearance isn't Tiffany-like, but its finish and construction quality (it weighs in at over 17 pounds!) are clearly uncompromising. That launch proved so successful that Panasonic's flagship player is now widely available, replacing the discontinued Oppo UDP-205 and UDP-203 players as the premium disc spinner du jour. In late 2018, the New York A/V dealer Value Electronics ended up becoming the exclusive U.S. Although a less expensive player, the DP-UDP820, had been widely available for some time, this new model clearly offered more. When Panasonic introduced its flagship DP-UB9000 Ultra HD Blu-ray player in early 2018, serious videophiles in the U.S.