Blu-ray Player Reviews

Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Unique adjustability
Outstanding overall performance
Tank-like construction
Minus
Complex adjustments
Won't play SACDs

THE VERDICT
If you're in the market for an Ultra HD Blu-ray disc player that can do everything you want, and plenty of things you didn't know you wanted, Panasonic's flagship model leaves little on the table.

When Panasonic introduced its flagship DP-UB9000 Ultra HD Blu-ray player in early 2018, serious videophiles in the U.S. were set to drooling. Although a less expensive player, the DP-UDP820, had been widely available for some time, this new model clearly offered more. In late 2018, the New York A/V dealer Value Electronics ended up becoming the exclusive U.S. source for the DP-UB9000. That launch proved so successful that Panasonic's flagship player is now widely available, replacing the discontinued Oppo UDP-205 and UDP-203 players as the premium disc spinner du jour.

Features
The THX-certified DP-UB9000's appearance isn't Tiffany-like, but its finish and construction quality (it weighs in at over 17 pounds!) are clearly uncompromising. It's compatible with a wide assortment of disc formats, including Blu-ray 3D. That said, some users may be put off to learn that format support doesn't extend to Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio.

In addition to its two HDMI outputs (there's no HDMI input) and two USB ports (2.0 on the front, 3.0 on the back), the player sports 7.1 analog audio, balanced and unbalanced stereo analog audio, and optical and coaxial digital audio outputs.

The DP-UB9000 includes a number of unique audio features, many of them simply offering frequency response tweaks that most users will ignore. But the player's variable Analog Output Filter presets (Sharp, Slow, Short Delay, Super Slow) might be of interest. These are available only from the analog outputs and modify the slope of the high frequency cutoff required by any digital audio source. This is typically fixed in most digital gear, though some audiophiles like to have selectable options. That said, most DP-UB9000 owners will feed their AVR or pre-pro via a digital audio connection from the player, rendering the feature irrelevant.

The Panasonic supports the HDR10, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and HLG HDR formats. As Kris Deering noted in his DP-UB820 review, since many Ultra HD discs are mastered at a higher peak luminance level than most displays can handle, a process called tone mapping is used for HDR playback. Metadata on the disc tells the set to "remap" the HDR data to meet the set's capabilities, minimizing peak white clipping while still taking some advantage of bright highlight detail the set can't otherwise deal with. Since the metadata specifying peak luminance on a disc can sometimes be inadequate or wrong, the Panasonic ignores it and generates its own metadata.

Setup
The DP-UB9000 offers a range of six peak white settings (two more than the DP-UB820 provides) that correspond to the light output capabilities of your display. These are located deep in Player Settings menu: two for projectors, three for LCD TVs, and one for OLED TVs. The most appropriate option isn't always an obvious choice, though the visible differences can be subtle. For example, with the Sony XBR-65A9G OLED TV I used for my review, the Panasonic's High Luminance Projector option worked slightly better than the OLED one. That's because the OLED setting tone maps to a maximum light level of 1,000 nits, while Sony's A9G TV clips at about 565 nits and has its own dynamic tone mapping. But by using the Panasonic player's High Luminance Projector setting, which maps to 500 nits, the TV was freed up from doing any tone mapping at all.

To then enable the player's tone mapping based on your display type, you enter the Optimum HDR Adjustment menu (accessible directly via the Video Setting button on the player's thankfully backlit remote control) and turn on the HDR Optimizer. This menu also offers several other controls that I sometimes found useful. Tone Curve (Black) helped bring out shadow detail on discs that looked a bit dark. The Dynamic Range Adjustment could also be helpful to a lesser extent. A separate HDR Setting button offers four additional options for displaying HDR10 content, one Standard and three others that provide an increasingly bright picture. For viewing in my dark room, I mostly left this in Standard, though I occasionally ranged up one step to the Natural Environment setting.

A two-step Status button on the remote provides basic information about a disc you've just loaded. A Playback Info button (also with two steps) provides information about the HDR10 metadata on the disc and how that data is being mapped by the player before being passed on to the display. The Video Settings and HDR Settings, however, including the HDR Optimizer and its associated features, are not available for Dolby Vision sources. If your set does support Dolby Vision (an increasing number of sets do) you can switch it off in the Settings menu and drop the source back to HDR10 (the base layer that Dolby Vision is built on). This will open all of the above adjustments if you think you can do better, although you probably won't. Dolby Vision's tone mapping is dynamic (varied scene-by-scene) while the Panasonic HDR Optimizer's mapping is static (it assumes the same peak luminance for the entire disc).

The player also gives you the option to retain an Ultra HD disc's 4K and wider color gamut minus HDR by converting the output to SDR/1080p. You simply select SDR/BT.2020 (Auto) in the HDR/Color Gamut Output option in the Setup menu. (Unfortunately, this setting is buried deep and not helpfully labelled: Setup>Player Settings>HDMI>Advanced Settings>HDR/Color Gamut Output.) Some projector owners find this conversion useful since many projectors aren't bright enough to deliver HDR without negative picture quality side effects. I'd recommend trying to find a suitable setting using the Panasonic's HDR Optimizer before accepting this compromise, however.

The Panasonic offers a limited selection of built-in apps including Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and YouTube. It also provides a blizzard of other video (and audio) features, most of them covered, but not necessarily clearly, in a 49-page owner's manual you can download from Panasonic's website. I recommend that any potential DP-UB9000 buyer review this manual carefully to ensure that they won't find the player's complexity intimidating.