H,i I'm Steve kindig and I'm here to talk about two panasonic Ultra HD blu-ray
players. Going to talk about the DP-UB820 and the DP-UB9000. I'm going to
start off talking about the DP-UB820. This is a 4k ultra HD blu-ray player, it
plays both 4k blu-rays as well as standard 1080p blu-rays, and even 3D
blu-rays. One of the things that's probably special about the Panasonic
players is they've paid a lot of attention to the HDR performance, and that's
something that different TV manufacturers handle HDR in different
ways, and one of the the key differences in is in what they call tone mapping. And
these Panasonic players have a very sophisticated way of dealing with tone
mapping, and and they make it possible for you to get a better-looking display
and and see more fine detail in HDR content. Both models have tone
mapping features that are pretty much the same, but first I want to talk
about the '820. It actually gives you four different settings for different types
of displays. So there's one setting for OLED and one for high-brightness LCD TVs,
one for medium brightness LCD TVs, and then another for basic LCD TVs and
projectors, and both of those tend to have lower
brightness capabilities. And then another cool feature is something that Panasonic
calls HDR optimizer, which lets you adjust the HDR setting according to the
brightness in your room, so it gives you really two ways to kind of optimize HDR
for your setup, and that's important and that's going to work for both the, you
know, whether you're playing a 4k blu-ray disc or using the built-in apps in the
player. And both of these players support 4k streaming for Netflix, Amazon and
YouTube, so one of the reasons these players do such a great job with HDR is
they have really powerful video processing built into them, and that
processing not only does a great job with HDR but also with just upscaling in
general whether you're watching like a standard 1080p Blu-ray, or maybe
even a DVD, the picture quality is really exceptional. And it also has a 7.1
channel analog output on the back, which is something that you don't see in many
blu-ray players anymore and what that means is that even if you have an older
receiver, like a really old receiver that doesn't have HDMI inputs, you can still
connect this player to your receiver if it has analog input and you can still
get full 7.1 channel sound. And this player also has dual HDMI outputs, and
one is for video and one is for audio, and you can use the audio output on a
receiver that's as maybe, say, only a few years old that has HDMI inputs but maybe
doesn't have the most up-to-date HDCP copy-protection, you can use this HDMI
output for that. And then there's a completely separate one that you would
connect to your TV, and that's just for video. Let me talk a little bit about
Panasonic's flagship player, the DP-UB9000. So it has pretty much the same
video features as the '820, it does add a couple more
HDR settings so you can even do a better job of customizing it to your particular
display, but really this player is sort of more designed for someone who's both
an audiophile and a videophile, because it has an upgraded digital-to-analog
converter, and it also has in addition to having 7.1 channel analog output it has
a dedicated stereo output that's analog RCA. It also has balanced XLR outputs for
stereo, which is great if you have like a preamp processor or a or even just a
stereo preamp. And other than that, really if you just pick up this player
you can kind of feel the difference. It weighs about three times as much. This is
an all-metal chassis. This one is mostly plastic. And this one also has a
completely different disc drive. It's a very rugged heavy-duty disc drive, and it
features a steel plate in it to reduce vibration. Really the the entire
construction of the '9000 is aimed at minimizing vibration. You may be familiar
with the players that Oppo used to make. They were very popular with
audiophiles and videophiles, provided reference picture and sound quality,
but they stopped building those players last year and so we've
kind of been looking around ever since for players to replace them, and we think
these Panasonics should fill the bill. Again, we're really excited to have them
in our mix. Now if you have any questions about these or any other 4k blu-ray
players, please give us a call.