Panasonic 4K Blu Ray Player, Dolby Vision, HDR10+ – DP-UB820-K

My old LG 4K player started to act up by freezing twords the end of any movie and not wanting to switch layers, so I decided to do some research.
This 4K player was always in top 3 if not the number 1 pick.
It arrived a day sooner than promised and in great condition.
The set up was easy and straightforward by following the onscreen prompts.
The amazing picture quality was absolutely noticeable from the start!!
The sound quality is rich with subtle details I previously didn’t notice.
The build of the unit is solid and sleek.
I haven’t used it for its highly praised upscaling yet, but I’m sure it won’t disappoint!!
It’s more expensive than other players, but I feel from the picture quality I’ve witnessed thus far (Star Wars: A New Hope and Top gun Maverick) it’s well worth the price!!
I look forward to watching countless movies now, without wondering when it’s going to freeze 3/4 of the way through the movie.
The remote is nice and straightforward. The only slight downside to me is the lack of streaming apps available. No Disney+, but has Netflix and Prime video.
The setting options are in depth, but I’m not going to play around with them. They are all there if that’s what you’re looking for.

This Panasonic largely does what it is supposed to, with just a few shocking unforced errors. The worst of these is Panasonic’s failure to program into the machine the good old-fashioned “resume play” operation for blu-ray disc playback. Yes, apparently it was (thought?) that resume play for ultra-HD discs would be adequate. As a viewer with a library of blu-ray discs who bought this machine to be future-proof, I must disagree. There are some who say that this fault is easily remedied by inserting a USB thumb drive, but these opinions are erroneous. I quote page 19 of the online Owner’s Manual: “On BD-Video discs including BD-J, the resume play function does not work.” I had read that some blu-ray discs have this feature programmed into the disc itself. This does in fact turn out to be the case, but very few discs have this feature (see end of review if interested). This is a stunning deficiency. Watching a movie and taking a break for lunch or dinner? Interrupted by a phone call? You may have to restart the disc from scratch. Next deficiency—no direct access to points on the blu-ray disc. Left off at 42 minutes? When you restart do the old chapter-skip until you are close, then fast forward to line up. Next, no owner’s manual included. Others have noted this as well. It’s not that simple a machine, or a cheap one. I have downloaded the manual, referred to it often, and printed some pages myself. The “Basic Owner’s Manual” provided is a joke, truly worthless. I could describe it here in a few short sentences, but it’s not worth the time for you or me.
Let’s take a look at the remote control. Surprisingly, there is a huge “Netflix” button immediately above, aligned with, and larger than the frequently-used “up” cursor just above the “OK” (Enter) button. This has been called out by others, and I agree that even a careful user will of necessity hit this button on occasion. This results in delay and interruption while the Netflix app starts to load and the Netflix logo appears on the user’s screen. Secondly, while there is a “Closed Caption setup” button, this is unrelated to the subtitles for the hard of hearing. Some might be unsympathetic, but speaking as an aging “Boomer,” I assert that subtitles will only continue to increase in importance. The menu for that in the player is onerous, and the best solution is to use the pop-up menu that is usually on the disc itself—also not great while the opening dialogue is flying by.
All such criticisms aside, the machine loads quickly, runs smoothly and silently, and produces the expected excellent blu-ray picture. Therefore despite all this the UB820 still gets 4 stars. Panasonic, I hope, hope you are listening. “Unforced errors.”
As an epilogue for aspiring techies, a prominent You-tube post appears to demonstrate that simple insertion of a USB thumb drive into the USB port on the back of the machine endows this machine with memory needed to make the “resume play” feature operable. This is demonstrated using a disc from 20th Century Fox Studios, “The Revenant.” I was able to reproduce this result using “Walk the Line”, from the same studio, with or without a thumb drive inserted into the machine. “Sherlock” (produced by BBC, a Region A disc), and “Iron Man 2” (produced by Paramount), went to a complete restart with or without thumb drive. Simply pressing “Stop” once resulted immediately in going to –:– on the “Status” bar. With “Walk the Line,” on the other hand, I could even power off the machine and on restart by pressing “Play,” (which will power up the machine) we went right back to where we left off. It’s the disc, not the thumb drive. I also checked for firmware updates; my machine had arrived with the latest firmware version.

The Panasonic UB820 is a solid 4k UHD disc player, with fast loading times. Discs play from start to finish without any issues. Its appearance is somewhat simple but elegant and it doesn’t weigh that much. The only thing I could blame it for is the slowness of its apps, although the playback of videos on YouTube, Amazon Prime and Netflix is ​​good, it sometimes gets a bit slow, so you have to be patient. The remote control seemed compact and comfortable, nothing to complain about.

I have tried DVDs, Blu-ray and Blu-ray 4k, and they play smoothly. The image quality is outstanding, sharp and very configurable, you can see the benefits of the graphics processor it has.

Without a doubt it is the best cost-benefit player today, unlike any video game console or players from other brands and models, for all lovers of the physical format.