Panasonic DP-UB820EB-K Ultra HD Blu-Ray Player – Black
Panasonic DP-UB820EB-K Ultra HD Blu-Ray Player – Black
DP-UB820
Ultra HD Blu-Ray Playback
Yes
Ultra HD Blu-Ray Playback
Yes
Ultra HD Blu-Ray Playback
Yes
Dolby Vision
No
Dolby Vision
Yes
Dolby Vision
Yes
HDR Optimizer
No
HDR Optimizer
No
HDR Optimizer
Yes
High-Res Audio Playback
Yes
High-Res Audio Playback
Yes
High-Res Audio Playback
Yes
7.1ch Analogue Audio Output
No
7.1ch Analogue Audio Output
No
7.1ch Analogue Audio Output
Yes
| Dimensions: | 20.4 x 43 x 6.3 cm; 2.2 Kilograms |
| Model: | UB820EB |
| Manufacture: | Panasonic |
| Dimensions: | 20.4 x 43 x 6.3 cm; 2.2 Kilograms |
This player delivers a great movie experience and delivers a excellent pin sharp picture with great cinema quality sound on all movies and TV shows. Also has great build quality. Was wellworth the money.
Amazing bit of kit, brings my LGC1 & denon AV to life
Great picture quality. No noise from the player after loading a disc. Shame there’s no wifi
Bought as a new item. Box obviously had been knocked about and previously opened. No batteries and unsealed remote suggest a return or repair. Fortunately works fine no problem with Panasonic just slightly annoyed that it wasn’t brand spanking
A great replacement for our previous 4k player by the same make. I just hope the lasers don’t fail too on this one
Super fast delivery.
The audio quality with music DVDs and Cds has a great full sound and separation through a quality HI FI system.
Simple display and easy to use remote.
Recommend.
This is a nice little blu-Ray player at a great price.Just plugged into the t.v 2 minutes later all was done put on a movie and wow what a picture. Mind you I suppose what tv you have????
Can’t recommend this enough. Previously had a Sony x700 that kept freezing during 4K films and Dolby vision had to be turned on it wouldn’t just pick it up automatically. All the issues I had with the Sony have disappeared with the UB820. Can watch films in 4k/Dolby Vision and it’s flawless. This is the player you want if you’re looking for one.
This little Panasonic is great at playing discs and USB content, the picture quality it excellent, it has Dolby Atmos and DTS audio capability, every file type I tested from various sources on an external HDD worked perfectly.
The menu layout for playing content from an external HDD is clean and simple, it does not make thumbnails for each video, which usually takes too long to fill out on other players, I think this is better.
There is only one USB 2.0 port on the front of this model, but it can play any content up to 4K from an external HDD, the HDD should be formatted to NTFS for best performance.
An interesting point to note is that the USB port is rated to take up to a 4TB HDD, my Seagate 5TB HDD worked just fine, so maybe it can take even larger capacity drives.
The Panasonic DP-UB450EB-K is a basic no frills player but what it does, it does it very well, and at just 179 it’s a real bargain, I gave it 5 stars, I would definitely recommend this player.
It’s a very good player for 4k and Blu ray. I like it very much. The only thing is I base in Singapore. And Blu ray is region B.
I can say bye bye to OPPO.
Thanks Amazon UK!
Pro’s: great picture , good sound and many options to choose from in settings.
Con’s: not sure if it is just my player but the fan built internally into the back of the player is very noisy!
I suspect that users had older player that used to have the automated flap that opened and closed when loading discs however on this player it is manual. The fan at the back is quite noisy, again this is might be the ‘spinning’ noising that is complained about in other reviews but on my machine is isn’t that bad.
What isn’t stated clearly is that you need to tweak the settings to get the player to output decent picture quality. When I first turned this on and played some discs (Finding Dory, Tron: Legacy, Interstellar 4K) I was really underwhelmed by its picture and sound performance with the motion looking very odd; I was thinking that my PS3 was a better Blu-ray player.
At this point your probably thinking 300 and it sounds pretty basic? I guess what you are paying for is the HCX Processor (for upscaling and decoding) this is the same that is in the Panasonic UB-DP9000, and this is why it wins the reviews.
Once you set it up, with your Player configured correctly (e.g. 4K, OLED, PAL, 4:4:4 Colour, BD- Video Secondary Audio Off, Seamless Play Off etc), to what your TV (and cables) support the picture and sound is astonishing. — I really would recommend watching a YouTube video on setting it up and reading the manual to get the best out of it.
I have given this player 4 out of 5 stars as the amount of setup you need to do to get a good picture out of it. What would have been great on this player is if in its ‘Easy Setup Mode’, it had some ‘4K (36 bit Colour) High-Quality Picture’ and ‘High Quality Audio’ modes that just configured all the relevant options to actually make the picture good, rather than having to set a lot of various settings on and off to enable it in that mode. I love having the fine tune settings but if there is an Easy Setup Mode it would be great if it had some high-level options as stated above (i.e. what you’re trying to achieve, do you want a 4K HDR player or to you still need it to be 1080).
This player also has a lot of Apps that you can use but I already have them on my TV and I don’t need them on this device, I guess you might need them if you had a 4K TV but only wanted 1080 Apps, or didn’t have a TV made after 2015. To be honest, I would have rather had a better quality ‘silent’ fan at the back rather than the extra Apps and App buttons on the Controller.
Overall this is a great player with some minor annoyances.
After having problems with previous player that Amazon refunded me, I was “blown away” by the picture on my Samsung Neo QLED TV without changing any settings.
I later found that I could specify I have a high brightness HDR screen, and like the ability to tweak HDR settings direct from the remote.
Haven’t tried the inbuilt 7.2 analogue outputs, but the optical Dolby or DTS 5.1 to my AV amp works brilliantly for me.
Watched the 4K Alfred Hitchcock version of Vertigo this afternoon and the picture quality in terms of detail and brightness was amazing.
Ordinary DVDs and Blu-rays look great as well and better then on my older players, but naturally can’t offer the HDR benefits.
Very happy with the UB820 and results look so much better than streaming from Amazon Prime and Disney+ even with HDR.
Before buying this I watched 4K movies on by PS5, which wasn’t bad.
All I can say is that there is a difference in colors when using the UB820. What stood out to me was when I first seen Thor Ragnarok on PS5. The colors were OK but nothing spectacular. Honestly I couldn’t really understand why others were praising it to be a color poping movie.
Then I got the UB820 and I was amazed. The colors were more saturated and they did pop right of the screen.
I had mine purchased from Amazon UK all the way to Romaina since here you can’t find this model for 6 months now. And it was cheaper to buy it from Amazon.
It was just the Panasonic player box. No extra protection or anything. I can’t say I’m OK with this. It could have been damaged.
But fortunately it arrived OK in about 4 days.
The player is very silent. You don’t even notice it when you watch movies.
The menu is pretty straight forward. But you can feel the software feels old.
The remote control is again just a mess of buttons clustered together, that I don’t really need. And it’s bulky. Just like your remotes from the 2000’s. They could have made a smart remote at least.
As for smart features, I have a smart TV so I won’t watch netflix or youtube from the Panasonic.
Also, if you have an external HDD with more partitions, this player will only recognize 1 partition. This is pretty stupid. My 10 year old TV could recognize the 2 partitions from my HDD.
But overall the player does what it supposed too, it plays 4K movies and Atmos very well. The best for this price.
After the absolute mess I had with my Sony 4k player, I refunded it and tried again with this Panasonic DP-UB450EB-K. The results were night and day when compared to the previous player, a real good purchase. Thankfully.
The Panasonic DP-UB450EB-K came very well packaged. The player was in a good solid box, housed in some tight fitting styrofoam. There were little compartments for the remote etc and was very easy to get out. No mess or any need to destroy the box to get it out. I immediately plugged the thing in and well, it worked straight out of the box. Literally. I had to tweak a few settings to get 5.1 working etc. But apart from that, not only did it have better sound and visual than the previous player and my XBOX one, but it was considerably more practical to use.
I almost had serious buyer’s remorse when it came to 4k films. Thankfully, this Panasonic DP-UB450EB-K saved the day and has been great since. I couldn’t recommend it more.
After the initial setup an setting tweaks the picture quality is on a different level. Any HDR format (not including HDR10+ my tv does not support) makes the picture look rich and lifelike , not overblown which my Xbox did. I’m puzzled that other reviewers state this players makes no difference, my experience is the opposite. HDR levels are adjustable to suit your taste.
It also plays back Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision beautifully, and at times reference quality dependant on content of course but in my experience this machine is very good. If like me you have many dvds, blurays and 4k discs, this machine is for you. Ignore the negatives, load times are quick too. It’s upscaling qualities are also very good, in my honest opinion physical discs look and sound much better than streaming. Buy this machine before the price goes up. Enjoy…..
Bought this to replace an original Sony X800 in a Sony KD9005A / DN STR1080 / X800 setup.
Picture not as vivid, on the other hand this will play a movie all the way through whereas the Sony would freeze and require
a reset at least once !
Contemplated the gen 2 Sony X800 M2 but apparently that suffers from the same freezing problems.
So what about the Panny ?
Out of the box, picture was a little dull and washed out, and much tinkering with the admittedly extensive settings was required.
Suspect its optimised for HDR TV sets which mine is not.
User interface is complicated and fiddly in comparison with the Sony.
Decent sized remote easy on the hand.
My TV stopped supporting most internet services so I looked for a replacement but chose this instead. It has all the normal physical disk support including the UHD resolutions that nobody can actually play so I could not test but the network services are why I bought it. It has excellent support for all the online services such as Netflix,Amazon,BBC and loads of others that I have not looked at. Physically I have played DVDs and it is a perfectly quiet competent player, not tried higher resolution disks although I have no reason to doubt that they would play perfectly.
I only have a analog amplifer so had use these outputs but then found that the sound was delayed by a few 100ms which was incredibly annoying. The firmware within the unit has a option to correct for this so after a few
attempts I found the right delay setting, this is just trial and error but it is time consuming and if you don’t find the option a show stopper.
Looking for a future proof player that would get the best out of my full hd 21:9 philips lcd tv, has support for dolby vision & hdr10+ should i upgrade to oled or hdr for a projector.
I finally decided on this dp-ub820 because of the hcx chip and dolby vision support and i can only say it’s fantastic!
The colors pop and using the very extensive controls on hdr to sdr conversion in this player my fullhd tv never looked so good. Lots of detail in the darkest scenes when watching 1917 or passengers, rich colors in the fifth element. No picture judder or pausing when switching layers during playback. And the atmos sound is simply amazing. Watching the shallows you feel like you are under water with big waves crashing down on you, roaring jet engines in top gun, what a difference with streaming.
It’s not the cheapest player out there but it is sure worth every penny
This is a great little 4k player for the price, considering it supports both HDR10+ and DolbyVision. Other brands models are relatively much more expensive.
It doesn’t have extras like analogue audio outputs, built-in apps, wifi etc., but if like me you have invested in a top TV and AVR, you won’t care about those, and would rather save 100’s of pounds on features you’ll never use! Instead you get great picture quality. For comparison, I previously had an Xbox One S, and the Panasonic picture quality is noticeably better. It’s also great that it has CEC so you can control from your TV remote (which you can’t on an Xbox).
My only gripe is with the eject button: if pressed in the ‘off’ state, it opens the tray, but you have to wait a minute for the player to start-up before you can close it again (arrgggh!), which is annoying.
It would also be nice if there was a ‘native’ resolution output option, to allow the TV to do upscaling instead of the player, but considering it does a decent job, I won’t complain.
the unit takes a few seconds to start up and the menu screen is simple in terms of layout and navigation and you can play dvds, blurays and uhd blurays, the unit upscales the first two options and plays uhd natively. there is a little noise as the disc tray opens and closes but the unit is reassuringly quiet when spinning a disc. all the reviews i read of this unit praised the picture quality and they are right. the discs i tried first were a dvd ‘the goodies… a second helping’, a bluray ‘doctor who the resolution of the daleks’ and a uhd bluray ‘jaws 45th anniversary edition’. colours are vivid yet lifelike with good deep blacks and given the fact that this is definitely at the budget end of players you really cannot expect a better picture. the sound through my hisense m3300 50″ 4k tv was nice and clear with a good separation between low, middle and high frequencies. i do not use anything other than the tv speakers as the hisense has a good set built in.
there is a usb port to the front of the unit which allows a memory stick to be plugged in to display / play digital media but this is a feature i don’t intend to use and as such i haven’t tested it.
what surprised me is the size and weight of the unit itself. the unit is very compact and has a nice clean, simple look to it and after the xbxonex which weighs a good few kg the panasonic feels like it is made of nothing but air. once in place though the feet do a good job of ensuring the unit doesn’t move around.
in conclusion this is a budget 4k player that punches well above its weight in terms of picture quality. highly recommended.
update as of 090620 – decided to change the wallpaper on the unit so plugged in an 8gb ntfs format stick with a jpeg on it. the picture displayed with a black border either side. resized the jpeg to 3840*2160 and tried again. this time the picture displayed as full screen. set it as wallpaper and the background now looks much more interesting than the plain black it used to be.
I was looking to replace my Samsung K8500 and this player sort of fit the bill. It has it’s pros and cons.
First I will say I found for blu-ray disk make sure they are extremely super squeakily clean. I have had to give delivered brand new disk a hard wipe just with nothing even on them to get them to play in this player. Other players like the K8500 or Philips BPD-7502 or even a standard PC drive just played them without issue. It defiantly is flaky when it comes to playing blu-ray disks or mine has been.
I have only a few good old Sci-Fi series on DVD that so far no blu-ray has been produced and up-scaling is quite good for DVDs. The Picture quality for disk playback is defiantly better and for 4K blu-ray playback the tone mapping seems to be a bit better but is not offered when viewing Dolby Vision disks. Also options I have found to be quite good on this player offering more customisation then other providers.
Apps well you get BBC Iplayer, Amazon, Netflix which has some quirks but no Plex and not much audio support beyond just Dolby Digital if your using your NAS to stream which is disappointing. I got this player more for disk playback so it did not make me to disappointed but I do feel for the price this should be capable of more.
Now, it’s a GOOD player. Possibly fantastic at this price point, but the two areas it lacks really spoil it for me, though there’s possibly nothing better on the market in the sub-500 range to beat it.
1) It can be quite noisy to start up when reading and caching / chapter searching a disk. The Oppo was practically silent at this, as well as fast. Now, whilst the Panasonic is fast, it certainly isn’t silent, and reminds me of my old floppy disk drives as it grinds and creaks its way to playback. It just sounds cheap.
2) This is a big problem for me : I watch movies piecemeal, and often pause them – sometimes for days – before resuming from the precise moment I paused whenever I want. This is a much more convenient way of resuming playback than the playback-resume function authored (if you’re lucky!) into the disks themselves, which often requires a lot of waiting-time as the disk is reloaded, the obligatory anti-piracy and warning pages endured (which you can’t skip through), and then after a few minutes you get to resume what you were watching. And of course, if the disk WASN’T authored with a resume function, you have to go searching, and typically this will involve re-watching from the beginning of the last chapter you think you stopped at (if you can remember!).
The Panasonic does NOT pause like an Oppo. After 5 minutes of being on pause, the unit automatically shuts down, even if eco-mode and auto shutdown are both disabled. As of writing this review, there’s no way to avoid this in the settings. It’s done I believe because the pause is not actually disengaging the laser, but is continuously running it live, and thus creating a risk of burnout. It’s a safety feature, but the truth is it’s a software kludge intended to overcome a design flaw which shouldn’t be there in the first place.
However, all of the above being said, once the player gets going and does what it’s supposed to do (play your DVD’s Blu Rays and 4k UHD HDR content), its picture and audio quality is OUTSTANDING.
At its present price point, I’m considering it a stop-gap measure to fill the void between my old Oppo and the next gen of high end players, but IF I can get used to its shortcomings, I may just learn to love it. This is high audio and videophile praise, folks so make of this what you will!
EDIT 30/7/19. Tv is now a 4K Philips PUS6703 and good 4K HDR disks look astonishing. Added bonus is Netflix via the Panasonic built in app is in Dolby Digital + 7.1 channel audio – super.