The OPPO 203.
The Panasonic UB900.
These are two of the best, not to mention most expensive, 4K Blu-ray players on the
market today.
For months, owners and non-owners have been debating which one actually gives a better
picture.
In this video, we're going to do a scientific, technical comparison of their picture quality,
and settle the argument... at least for today.
Stay tuned.
Hello everyone, my name is Vincent Teoh, and I'm a professional TV reviewer and calibrator
at HDTVTest.
In this channel, we do scientific TV reviews, video interviews, settings tips and tricks,
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Let's get on with the comparison.
To kick things off, let's get something out of the way: the OPPO UDP-203 has one unassailable
advantage over the Panasonic DMP-UB900, in that the OPPO will be able to support Dolby
Vision HDR format following a firmware upgrade later this year.
All current Panasonic Ultra HD Blu-ray players on the market, including the UB900, will not
support Dolby Vision, at least that's what Panasonic engineers tell us.
So if you own a Dolby Vision-capable television like a 2016 or 2017 LG OLED, you should probably
choose the OPPO 203 to take advantage of the theoretical dynamic metadata benefits
of Dolby Vision.
As of April 2017 when this video was filmed, there are no Dolby Vision discs and players
available on the market, so we can't definitively say it's superior to HDR10 4K Blu-rays until
we can do a proper comparison.
Ok, with that out of the way, let's start by comparing how the OPPO 203 and the Panasonic
UB900 handle 4K Blu-rays.
Both players have been updated to their latest firmware respectively... version 329 on the
OPPO UDP-203; 1.73 on the Panasonic DMP-UB900.
We hooked up the players to the same HDMI port on a calibrated Samsung KS9500 full-array
local-dimming LED LCD, and to compare the video output between the players, we simply
swapped HDMI cables, and took photos with a locked-off camera.
As I explained in a previous unboxing video of the OPPO 203, 4K Blu-ray discs are encoded
in 4:2:0, so what will separate one player from another is the quality of chroma upsampling
from 4:2:0 to 4:2:2 or 4:4:4.
If we put up a chroma zone plate pattern that's been mastered in 4K HDR, we can see that the
Panasonic resolved more fine chroma detail than the OPPO.
Now don't get me wrong: firmware update 329 has improved the OPPO a lot in this respect,
but its chroma frequency response is still slightly behind the Panasonic - on the OPPO,
the circles towards the edges of the screen became more jagged faster, whereas the Panasonic
maintained their smoothness better.
Can you see this difference in real-world 4K Blu-rays?
Well, in all honesty, probably not from a normal viewing distance, because we're now getting
into pixel-peeping territory, but hey, these products are of such high quality that we
have to do this to separate them.
The biggest difference is seen when you watch a 4K Blu-ray that's mastered in native 4K
or higher with a high bit-rate, for example Lucy or Sully, on a television that can faithfully
reproduce 4:4:4 chroma.
Under these conditions, the Panasonic UB900 just resolves the finest coloured detail that
bit cleaner, smoother and brighter.
Moving onto upscaling of 1080p Blu-rays, we again used a chroma zone plate pattern from
the excellent Spears and Munsil Benchmark test disc, only this time it's in SDR 1080p.
Here, the Panasonic kept the curves smoother too.
Again, in real-world viewing the difference is going to be extremely minor, but if you
play a high-bit rate Blu-ray such as Oblivion or Skyfall, the Panasonic UB900 is going to
resolve the finest chroma detail just marginally better.
So far, we've been talking about differences that are extremely subtle between the two
players, but the next one is very obvious, and it's in the area of HDR-to-SDR conversion.
Now, many of you will ask, why would anyone bother converting HDR-to-SDR?
The answer lies in what produces the best image from 4K Blu-ray movies on a low-brightness
display, such as projectors or 2015 LG OLEDs.
On these displays with low peak brightness, HDR doesn't look that good, either because
there's simply not enough dynamic range to do HDR justice, or in the case of projectors,
the black floor has to be elevated to try and hit certain peak brightness.
What some owners have been doing is to convert HDR-to-SDR when watching 4K Blu-rays, so they
can still get the 4K resolution and maybe wide colour gamut benefits from Ultra HD Blu-rays...
even in the absence of HDR.
Now on the surface, the OPPO 203 is better than the Panasonic UB900 for HDR-to-SDR conversion,
because the OPPO offers two modes.
If you go into the HDR Setting menu, selecting HDR off will ask the player to output SDR
with Rec.709 colours, whereas choosing "Strip Metadata" will ask the player to output SDR
with Rec.2020 colours.
On the Panasonic UB900, you don't get this choice.
If you turn [High Dynamic Range Output] to "Off", then the player will use the EDID of
the display to decide whether to send Rec.709 or Rec.2020 colours in SDR.
And most of the time it's going to be Rec.709.
If you want to get Rec.2020 colours in SDR one hundred percent of the time on the UB900,
you have to buy an external device such as the HD Fury Integral to feed the necessary
EDID to trick the player into outputting SDR BT.2020.
However, the result of Panasonic's HDR-to-SDR conversion is much better than the OPPO's.
The OPPO 203's HDR-to-SDR implementation suffers from a few problems, regardless of whether
[HDR Setting] was set to "Off" or "Strip Metadata".
If you look at this test pattern that is originally in HDR but has been downconverted to SDR,
the OPPO is not only crushing some shadow detail just above black, but also introducing
some posterisation in the gray ramp at the bottom of the screen, especially in the darker
regions.
The colour remapping was also off, causing colours to look less saturated.
In real world-content, you can see these issues in this scene from the 4K Blu-ray of the movie
Pan.
Notice how the shadow detail are missing in the boy's hair, and also in the background,
and how the gradations on his arm are stair-stepped rather than smooth.
Also, if we summon the interactive graphics layer, the scene selection thumbnails appear
washed out with elevated blacks, probably because of not using the correct transfer
function.
For comparison, here's how the Panasonic UB900 handled this exact same scene, converting
HDR to SDR.
The shadow detail remain intact, the skin tone gradations in the arm are smooth, and
the scene selection buttons are correctly rendered.
Bottom line is, if you want a 4K Blu-ray player that can accurately convert HDR to SDR, the
Panasonic DMP-UB900 is our pick.
So there you have it: both the OPPO 203 and Panasonic UB900 are high-quality 4K Blu-ray
players, but except for the lack of Dolby Vision, the Panasonic just does a few things better
than the OPPO, especially after the latest 1.73 firmware update which adds a 10-bit video
output mode, as well as a [Dynamic Range Adjustment control] to make HDR content more watchable
in a brighter environment.
Of course, OPPO may issue a firmware update in the future that may tilt the balance in
its favour, and we haven't tested the Sony X800 or the LG UP970, but for now, the Panasonic
DMP-UB900 is our reference Ultra HD Blu-ray player.
If you can't stretch your budget to the UB900, the step-down Panasonic UB700 and UB400 will
also deliver essentially identical picture quality.
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