Panasonic UB420

After some back and forth about the more budget DV-supporting UHD players decided to bite the bullet and just go for the Panasonic for the rave reviews its gets for its HDR Optimizer for OLEDs. I was expecting DV titles to be better, but Wow. Both regular HDR and DV look clearer and the audio is somehow so much better too. Unfortunately the PS5 is still terrible at stacking: https://i.imgur.com/IWtJcKK.jpg Maybe I'll end up putting the Pana on the bottom.

I got this Panasonic DP-UB420-K 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Player to watch movies with my smaller Vizio 22 inch bedroom HDTV. I was attracted to it's Wi-Fi capability as far as being able to switch to Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc when I wanted to watch something other than a movie on a disc. Here is my pros ...

If you leave it on all the time everything will be converted to fake Dolby Vision including standard 1080p Blu-ray discs. Leaving it off means that SDR content is output in the proper colour space but you only get HDR10 for HDR content. The [Panasonic is HDR10 only but is probably the best HDR10 only player around thanks to the HDR Optimizer feature.

The player does what it's supposed to do, it plays both 4K and Blu Ray discs perfectly. However, the experience of operating it is greatly reduced do to the atrocious remote control design and an awful user interface. These are the biggest issues with the remote: -No subtitle button. You need to men...

Being in the Samsung eco-system I'd recommend the [Panasonic instead since it supports HDR10 and HDR10+. The main reason to purchase the Sony would be Dolby Vision support and since your TV doesn't support Dolby Vision then I'd say HDR10+ support is more important to you. The UB420 also features Panasonic's excellent HDR Optimizer which helps optimize HDR for your specific TV. Also, in my experience, Samsung and Sony devices don't always play nice together when it comes to HDMI-CEC.

The video is very good. Do NOT buy the player because you feel the Streaming feature is a plus. It is very slow to connect to a streaming provider such as Netflix. It takes more than a minute to connect to the network. If you watch say, Netflix and then watch anything else, the network is automatica...

However this is going to be very expensive, relative to the other options. Otherwise the Panasonic DP-UB* series is generally recommended because of the good quality of its tone mapping implementation. However its UI and picture quality is not as good in my opinion, and as I noted in one of my other replies the DP-UB420 at least suffers from an initial audio bug.

Really not impressed with this player. The menu system is terrible and you can't change the icons on the home screen which means you can't put Netflix/Prime/YouTube on the home screen. You have to get to them by clicking the network service option and then picking the service you want. A minor annoy...

Forget the LG & Sony BR Player.

Panasonic UB420 or 820 are the best.

And you can make them even better:

https://www.regionfreedom.com/index.php

this is the first disc player of any kind I've ever had that did not have a built in display. have to use the remote and hit status twice ( and then a third time to get rid of it) Cant think of anything more ridiculous. Another quirk is that it actually generates more heat when off than when its pla...