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

I just needed a bare bones 4k Blu-ray player, no streaming apps, have an Apple 4k tv. This was the one of the few that fit my needs. Plays 4k discs beautifully. Regular Blu-ray’s look good, but regular dvd’s are not that good, it doesn’t upgrade to 4k. That’s ok, once you watch a 4k movie uncompressed, like streaming, you won’t want to watch anything else. The sound is amazing as well. Highly recommend if you are not interested in streaming from your Blu-ray player.

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.

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

It doesn't skip! Before this, I owned a LG 4k blu ray player and the Sony UBP-X700. Both had issues with freezing and skipping discs even though the discs where brand new and had no scratches or fingerprints. Panasonic is different. This is a budget friendly player at only $200, and it doesn't freeze/skip any of my discs. When it does skip, it is on a disc that needs cleaning or is badly damaged. If you take care of your discs, this player will take care of your basic 4k blu ray needs. It doesn't have WIFI. This makes it a little more difficult to update the player when needed. However, Panasonic has great software already and you likely won't need to update it often. It isn't a big deal for me. Just use ethernet or a USB thumb drive for updates and you are good to go!

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.