UHD Blu-Ray As It Should Be

Panasonic DMP-UB900 Ultra HD Blu-ray Player

- Al Griffin

PRICE $600

LOOKING BACK AT FORMAT launches over the past two decades, it becomes clear that most first-gen players were clunkers, and pricey ones at that. Dig deep through the Sound & Vision archives (on the web, or in your personal print library—you have one of those, right?), and you’ll unearth reviews of the first Blu-ray player, Samsung’s BDP-1000. Priced at $1,000, this ungainly machine took about one minute to load a disc, did quirky stuff (like first converting progressive-scan signals to an interlaced format before outputting them as 1080p), and delivered pictures that looked soft in comparison with those delivered by the HD-DVD format Blu-ray was aggressively warring with at the time.

When the second-gen Blu-ray players rolled out, prices had dropped by nearly half, picture quality issues had cleared up, and disc load times had improved. HD-DVD was still hanging around, but at that point it was “dead man walking.” Stacking up the first generation of Ultra HD Blu-ray players against their Blu-ray forebears, it’s not much of a comparison: The models shipping from Samsung, Philips, and now Panasonic range from reasonably priced to premium, deliver generally excellent picture quality, and are mostly free of operational glitches. The one damning thing that can be said about all of them is that they don’t support forthcoming discs in the Dolby Vision high dynamic range (HDR) format— something that’s anticipated for new players arriving in 2017. Of course, HDR10 support is on tap since that’s a requirement of the Ultra HD Blu-ray spec, in both players and all discs that carry HDR signals.