Panasonic has announced the UK availability and price of its UB900 Ultra HD Blu-ray player: £600 and available mid-April. That price is a little better than the estimated price of £700, but it’s still a chunk of money for the latest technology, especially compared to the Samsung UBD-K8500, which will cost £400 and will launch in March.
However, there are some differences between the players. First, Panasonic has announced that the UB900 will ship with two discs: San Andreas (a mediocre action film starring The Rock) and the well-received and quite bonkers Mad Max: Fury Road. Secondly, Panasonic’s player has more outputs.
In addition to the main 4K HDMI output, the UB900 has a separate HDMI output for audio only and it has 7.1 phono outputs. The latter two are useful for people with older amps that don’t support HDMI 2.0 and HDCP2.2. In comparison, Samsung’s player has only the two HDMI outputs: one for 4K video and audio, and one for audio only.
Read all you need to know about Ultra HD and 4K
While both Blu-ray players have support for HDR, Panasonic’s UB900 is THX certified (for video, not audio) and the full details of its colour support have been announced: 10-bit colour and the BT.2020 colour space. Certainly, watching Mad Max on a brand-new Panasonic DX902 TV, the colour depth was incredible and much closer to what the director intended than on a regular standard dynamic range TV. Of course, final judgement is going to have to be reserved until I can get a final review unit in.
In addition, the UB900 supports high-resolution audio files, including DSD and ALAC codec support. It has both built-in Ethernet and dual-band Wi-Fi. If Samsung’s player is more for everyone, Panasonic’s UB900 is certainly the high-end player for enthusiasts. I’ll bring you a full review as soon as samples are available.
