The Panasonic UB820 is a mid-range 4K Blu-ray player with a killer feature: it plays both the HDR10+ and Dolby Vision premium HDR 4K Blu-ray formats.
This admirably neutral approach to the latest ugly AV world format war will immediately win it many fans. But has the push for convenience and flexibility caused a drop in Panasonic’s traditionally excellent 4K Blu-ray standards?
Design
The Panasonic UB820 looks decent from a distance. Its top and front edges boast a gleaming reflective finish, while a drop down flap keeps the front as minimalistic as possible by hiding away the disc tray and a USB media port.
There’s a subtle brushed metal effect under the top edge’s sheen too, and its size is big enough to suggest it means business but small enough to comfortably fit on a TV stand shelf. The centrally mounted LED display (which you can still read through the smoked front flap) is also an attractive and useful design feature.
Get up close to the UB820, though, and some aspects of its build quality start to look pretty plasticky. At least when compared to high-end players such as the Oppo 203, the Cambridge Audio CXUHD, or Panasonic’s own UB9000.
The UB820’s remote isn’t very glamorous, but it gets the job done. It’s small but comfortable to hold, and while it’s a touch crowded, the key playback buttons at least are given enough space to make them easy to find even in a dark room.
Features
True to AV history form, the 4K Blu-ray world has managed to embroil itself in a messy format war. There are now two so-called dynamic HDR formats to worry about: HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. Both these formats provide extra scene by scene image data to help TVs present HDR pictures more effectively. The industry standard HDR10 format, by comparison, only provides one single set of image parameters for a TV to apply across the entire running time of a film.
Typically, TVs and 4K Blu-ray players only support one or other of the HDR10+ or Dolby Vision formats. The Panasonic UB820, though, supports both. Which I think is a pretty big deal. After all, why should getting the optimum picture performance from any disc you buy be dependent on which premium HDR format your AV gear supports?
Of course, the UB820’s format neutrality doesn’t mean much unless you also have a TV that supports both formats. The likes of Samsung (HDR10+ only), LG (Dolby Vision only) and Sony (Dolby Vision only), though, still only support one format. So if you’ve got a TV from one of these brands, I guess the UB820’s killer app may not matter to you. Though at the same time, doesn’t it make sense to future proof yourself for any TV you might buy later down the line?
Especially now that TVs that do support both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision are starting to appear. Panasonic, Philips (Europe) and TCL have come out of the blocks first with format-neutral TVs - and the UB820 would make a great partner for any of those sets.
Support for both dynamic HDR formats turns out to be just one of the UB820’s key charms. Also very promising is its HCX processor. HCX features such as edge-adaptive chroma processing and chroma upsampling have delivered gorgeous results on previous Panasonic players.
The Panasonic UB820 can also upscale HD Blu-rays and SD DVDs to 4K - and again, this upscaling has impressed on previous models, so hopefully it will again here.
Also great to find are options to convert HDR to SDR, and set the color output to 12 bit or 10 bit. The first of these features is potentially useful for owners of 4K projectors and relatively affordable 4K TVs, which tend to lack the brightness to handle HDR convincingly. The latter feature is there for people whose display devices suffer with excessive HDR color banding when using the default 12-bit output.
The Panasonic UB820 is much more thoughtful than most 4K Blu-ray decks, too, when it comes to letting you customize its HDR output. For starters, you can tell the deck what it’s attached to (an OLED screen, a low-/mid-/high-brightness LCD TV, or a projector) and it will adjust its HDR output accordingly.
Panasonic’s unique HDR Optimizer feature, meanwhile, lets you tell the player what peak brightness your display is capable of, so that it can ‘tone map’ HDR10 content (it doesn’t work with Dolby Vision or HDR10+) before outputting it to your display.
Your TV or projector can tone map HDR to its capabilities too, of course. But Panasonic is basically saying it thinks the quality of the UB820’s tone mapping can better that of your TV. And in the cases of many mid-range and budget TVs, at least, it’s probably right.
Note, though, that the player cannot be made to force all 4K Blu-ray playback into Dolby Vision. Some Sony decks permit this - but they don't also allow for automatic switching between DV and HDR10 if you'd rather (as I suspect most AV fans would) everything was sent to your TV in its native format.
The UB820 even carries an HDR Setting button on its remote that can adjust the deck’s HDR presentation based on the light levels in your room. Again, this is a thoughtful touch given the way HDR can actually often look too dark in a bright room setting. Just remember to return the setting to Standard for when you settle down for a true dark room home cinema experience, though.
Other helpful and unusual picture set up features include manual tweaks for dynamic range, brightness, black and white tone curves, and a System Gamma option added by a recent firmware update. Note that these last few options are only available with HDR10 content, not Dolby Vision or HDR10+.
While the UB820’s range of features is impressively long, it does make for a fairly complicated suite of picture menus, where it’s not always immediately obvious where making one adjustment might have a knock on effect with another. So handle with care.
The UB820 will play HD Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray, CD and DVD discs as well as 4K Blu-rays. There’s no support for SACD and DVD Audio, but while this feels like an unfortunate omission on Panasonic’s UB9000 flagship player, it feels fair enough on a $449/£299 deck.
Panasonic provides a fairly fulsome suite of ‘smart’ features on the UB820. These include Netflix and Amazon apps capable of playing shows in 4K and HDR. The interface the Panasonic UB820 is using for its smart features, though, is starting to look and feel seriously dated.
Oddly, the Netflix app in the UB820 insists on playing everything out in HDR - even shows that aren’t made in HDR - if you have the SDR/HDR Conversion option activated on the player. Yet if you turn SDR/HDR Conversion off, everything plays in SDR.
In other words, there's no automatic HDR/SDR switching within the Netflix app; you have to head manually into the Advanced Set Up menus every time you want to switch Netflix between SDR and HDR content.
It’s all very strange - and more than a little annoying. Especially when the Amazon Prime Video app has no difficulty in automatically switching its output between SDR, HDR and Dolby Vision as required to match the mastering of the show you’re watching, no matter what SDR/HDR Conversion setting you're using on the UB820.
This appears to be a Netflix issue rather than a Panasonic one, though - after all, the same situation occurs with Netflix’s Xbox One and PS4 apps.
The Panasonic UB820 can output Dolby Atmos from compatible streaming services, and carries an interesting feature that can convert (usually live event) HDR streams delivered in the HLG format - such as those provided by the BBC iPlayer in the UK - into HDR10. This is a great solution for people who own relatively old HDR-capable TVs that don’t carry HLG support.
The UB820’s audio support is more high end than that of most 4K Blu-ray players. Its connections, for instance, include analogue 7.1-channel audio outputs alongside the more typical HDMI and optical digital options. It also supports high resolution formats including WAV, FLAC, AIFF, ALAC and DSD (up to 11.2Mhz).
Other connections include two HDMI outputs (one for audio, one for audio and video); an Ethernet port (though Wi-Fi is also available); and a second, rear-mounted USB HDD port to go with the one on the front panel.
Performance
For the vast majority of the time the UB820 is a superb performer. Especially in the way its performance holds up across a wide range of TVs thanks to its uniquely flexible output options.
As we’ve come to expect from Panasonic 4K Blu-ray players, general detail and clarity with 4K Blu-rays is excellent. The impact of the resolution is boosted, too, by slightly more pop and pixel-level contrast control than you tend to get with regular 4K Blu-ray players.
Colors look gorgeous too. Slightly richer and more defined than the norm - but crucially not to an extent that starts to make them look unnatural. There’s no overcooking of tones, or forcing of color detail.
There’s precious little electronic noise to interfere with this sense of extreme sharpness either. Some of the 4K Blu-rays I tried looked a touch noisier in specific frames or localized parts of some shots than I’ve seen on some 4K Blu-ray decks. The more I studied this, the more convinced I became that for the most part this was down to the Panasonic’s accuracy actually bringing out more of the noise present in the source, rather than it adding noise of its own.
Motion is realistic and natural, and the sense of superior depth and refinement in good quality 4K images is palpable.
The prowess of the Panasonic UB820’s pictures is especially apparent on relatively affordable rather than ultra high-end TVs. With a humble Hisense 50K321 (sub-£450 in the UK for a 50-inch 4K HDR TV), tweaking the UB820’s output using the HDR Optimizer made a clear difference, with less loss of detail in very bright areas, and a generally more dynamic look to the image. In other words, the UB820’s tone mapping before output clearly trumped what the Hisense was able to do with its own processing of ‘raw’ HDR10 images.
The Panasonic UB820 automatically recognized Dolby Vision and HDR10+ discs just fine once both options were activated in its menus. And unlike the odd Dolby Vision implementation on Sony’s 4K Blu-ray players, it doesn’t output everything in Dolby Vision once the Dolby Vision option is selected. In other words, it switches between Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and HDR10 depending on what’s actually on a particular disc.
The deck delivers the advantages you would expect of HDR10+ and Dolby Vision sources: More dynamic and precise looking HDR images. Especially with relatively affordable TVs.
Just when I’d almost convinced myself there was nothing not to like about the Panasonic UB820’s 4K Blu-ray picture performance, though, I spotted something a bit strange. Near the start of the sequence in It where Eddie is chased by Pennywise in the form of a leprotic woman, there’s a shot where Eddie is walking down a street and the sun shines directly through some trees into the camera. And this extremely bright center of the image just didn’t look quite right; a bit too aggressive and ‘flared’.
Toggling Dolby Vision on and off in the UB820 with this shot revealed that in Dolby Vision mode the player was causing the image’s brightest parts to clip (lose subtle shading details). Playing the same sequence in Dolby Vision mode on the same TV using an Oppo 205 revealed no such clipping issues, so it’s not a previously unnoticed issue with the content, and it’s not an issue with the TV.
The same clipping occurred when using the UB820 with a different brand of Dolby Vision TV too, and could also be seen in peak bright areas (typically direct shots of the sun) on other Dolby Vision titles.
My first thought was that maybe this unexpected issue was being caused by one or more of the UB820’s many HDR output adjustments; the way you have to choose the type of display you’re using, for instance, or the HDR Optimizer feature. It turns out, though, that when Dolby Vision is playing these sorts of features are locked out - as you’d expect, actually, given Dolby Vision’s focus on providing a much more controlled, as-the-director-intended experience than you can get with standard HDR10.
I should stress at this point that the problem isn’t necessarily a deal breaker when you consider how much general picture quality and how many great features - including the all-important HDR10+ and Dolby Vision support - the UB820 is giving you for $449. You may even not really notice it, especially if you’ve never had any previous experience of a Dolby Vision system.
It is nonetheless a shame, though, to see what should be the pinnacle of the deck’s performance looking even slightly compromised. It’s also pretty strange, given that the processes involved with getting Dolby Vision support on a 4K Blu-ray deck should preclude these sorts of issues from happening.
Given the granular level of control the UB820 clearly has over its pictures, I wonder if Panasonic/Dolby might be able to fix this little DV issue via a future firmware update. Right now, though, it’s the only niggle in an otherwise excellent 4K Blu-ray picture performance.
The UB820 also does an excellent job of upscaling HD Blu-rays to 4K, delivering more sharpness but also significantly less noise than many other upscaling decks I’ve seen - including the otherwise mighty Oppo 203. Certainly I’d recommend that people with budget and even some mid-range TVs experiment with the UB820’s upscaler to see if they don’t prefer the results to the upscaling their TVs provide.
Also delivering surprisingly good results is the UB820’s system for converting HDR to SDR. The occasional really bold (especially green) color tone can look a bit off key, and one or two skin tones become marginally too yellow. But the results are overall plenty impressive enough to make the UB820 a great partner for a projector or low-brightness budget or mid-range TV that struggles to get HDR right.
The UB820’s audio is decent too - certainly a cut above entry-level decks. Even though the analogue outputs don’t benefit from the same level of audiophile componentry you get with the $1000 Panasonic UB9000, they deliver a warm, rich, clean sound - though experience of previous Panasonic flagship disc players would lead me to expect the UB9000 (which I haven't tested) to deliver superior dynamics and clarity.
The UB820’s high-res format support proves effective too, leaving as my only complaint a marginally clinical feel to CD playback. Though if you’re open to the idea of introducing a little audio processing to proceedings, the deck’s Digital Tube Sound option is pretty good at adding a more traditional, warm flavor to CD playback.
Aside from the Dolby Vision clipping niggle, the Panasonic UB820’s only area of weakness is its smart features. The operating system runs consistently slowly, whether you’re navigating the deck’s own menus or menus within specific apps. Worse, streamed video playback looked consistently quite glitchy, across both Netflix and Amazon Prime in particular, with more stuttering and juddering appearing over the same broadband connection than I experienced while watching the same content on the apps built into my TV.
Verdict
A sluggish smart system, juddery streaming apps and some strange Dolby Vision clipping perhaps remind us that the Panasonic UB820 is, after all, a sub-$450/£300 player. It is, however, still good value for a deck that’s bristling with features that are as useful as they are innovative (including the all-important dual HDR10+ and Dolby Vision compatibility) and which, for the vast majority of the time at least, is a seriously accomplished performer.
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