Panasonic Premium 4K Blu Ray Player, UHD DVD Blu Ray Player with Hi-Res Sound, 4K VOD Streaming, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision™, DP-UB450 (Black)

As of writing this these have been difficult to find. I do AV installs and believe it or not DVD's & Blurays are still a common request. This is a flawless, and superior blu-ray player. The quality of the unit, sound and image upscaling are top-tier. Glad to see Panasonic coming back strong.

For those that don't go deep into the rabbit hole, the key factors that make this the best bang-for-buck player may not stand out to them.In a nutshell, unlike Sony's offering, this player automatically enables Dolby Vision if the disk supports it. In fact, it is in all ways that matter virtually identical to the much more expensive Panasonic players that tout this feature.The build is more basic than the top-end models, but it's not poorly built and it is entirely functional. It has the goods where it matters.For the longest time, this unit was only available in Europe, and Panasonic snuck it into the US via Amazon and priced it at a great value point.I'm going to buy a second unit and keep it new in the box in case anything happens to the one I'm using. And I can do that for about the same money as buying the higher-end model that performs identically.It's a no brainer. Don't hesitate - buy this player!

The picture quality is great and it works well. Personally, I mostly wanted to upgrade from my Sony because another reviewer had said that the "media player" (off USB drive) was excellent and I've got my entire, enormous DVD collection of many thousands digitized onto a hard drive, so so many products that claim to support this, do it at the bare minimum... sometimes unusably (My Samsung TV will spend 10 minutes trying to read the files in one directory!) The Sony also had issues with navigating large folders... very painful. THIS player is MUCH better at reading the file system... the directories pop up immediately. The UI is high-res and clear, but I could have used a slicker looking interface than just dull directories of file names... but at least it works quickly.The BAD...It doesn't take lot of effort to hang this box to the point of needing to reboot. The first HD VIDEO FILE that I played froze the system up as soon as I went into double-fast-forward mode. (It would be a nightmare to return to a point deep inside a file if you ever accidentally exited it!) Another HD movie hung up the system during playback a short while later as well. But we have successfully watched several other movie files. I've NOT see it misbehave while playing discs.We've also seen some issues with closed caption (again, on video files, not on discs) where the captions would display each line for minutes at a time... so by the end of the show, it would still be showing lines from the beginning. Not sure if this is a widespread issue or specific to the files (from BBC discs of "Death in Paradise".) I've not seen any caption issues with discs so far.UPDATE: I wrote that it doesn't support CEC (one device controlling another over the HDMI cable) but that's not true. My SONY would turn off/on my whole system (TV, AV Receiver) whenever I powered off/on the DVD player... but this one behaves a little differently and it took me a couple more times to realize it. If I use the player's remote to turn the DVD off, it does not power down the whole system... but I CAN use the TV remote to control the DVD player (so it must be communicating) and if I turn the TV off... it WILL turn off the DVD player along with everything else... in a way, it's actually the preferred behavior, so you can turn off the DVD player and switch to something else without accidentally powering everything off.It also seems that for a "premium" player, it could use higher quality materials... it's not bad, it's just no better than any other player at half the price.So... video quality-wise, no complaints. All the basic stuff is well presented and easy to use (although it took me a while to figure out that it had SEPARATE settings for old-school 608 vs HD 708 closed captions, so I couldn't figure out why they wouldn't display after I turned them on... gotta set both!) The media player feature, while better than most, still feels like an afterthought and could has room for improvement.4.0 - 4.5 stars

I originally bought another brand (not sure if I am able to say S--y in a review) that was more expensive than this one, and supposedly had better features. It did not work well, so I got this one. This Panasonic is more reliable than the other brand. It doesn't freeze during playback (the other one did), and its video and audio quality are just as good. It is lower cost, and is also more compact so it fits in smaller spaces. The Panasonic doesn't feel as sturdy as the S--y, because its housing is plastic compared to the metal housing of the player that didn't work well. I'll take one that works even though it has a plastic housing instead of one that doesn't work, with a metal housing. This Panasonic has an external power supply similar to what you would use with a laptop computer. The other one was internal, which probably added a bit to its weight. I think worth mentioning, freezing during playback has been a known problem with that other brand for a while. It was supposedly corrected by a firmware update, but when I updated the firmware, it improved nothing.

While it worked I would give it 4 out of 5 stars. It occasionally would not read discs, but if you ejected the disc 1 to 2 times it would eventually recognize the disc and play. I had no freezinging issues and it played all regional discs. Plays either HD10+ or Dolby Vision. The tray was a bit noisy when opening and closing. Was watching a 4k - Alien - and stopped to eat dinner. I went to resume playing and got the message about the disc being incompatible. No matter how many times a ejected the disc it would not recognize it. I tried 11 other discs and it no longer recognized anything or any format. 4k Bluray or DVD could not be read. Unglugged everything including power and HDMI. Reset every thing. This device no longer works. I bought it exactly 90 days go so only parts will be covered under warrenty. Been 3 days and Panasonic still has not gotten back to me about packing and shipping it back for repairs. Depending on cost it may simply go into the trash. Already went to Best Buy and bought a Sony X800M2 which I like better. So far it reads all discs...also region free no HD10+ but does have Dolby Vision which is better in my opinion. Tray is ultra quiet.If it does not cost too much money to repair the Panasonic UB450, it will be a backup if the Sony ever breaks.At this time however, Panasonic is not impressing me. Glad I didn't buy one of their new TVs after entering the U.S. market again if this is the type of quality and service I can expect from them.

Good value and marginally better than competing roducts.