Not that they made any good ones. The Panasonic ones is where it’s at.
Ah I’ve always gone for the Sony ones, is there a significant gap?
The reviews of the Panasonic ub820 are pretty high. Mostly because it’s price to performance.
The UB9000 and X800M2 are both superb disc players
That said, the only things to recommend the 9000 over the 820 is the build chassis quality, dead silent disc spinning, and improved DAC.
As my A/V goes through my Onkyo receiver (which supports all the standards I care about) and I usually have some level of background house noise anyway (furnace, etc.), it wasn’t worth triple the price for me.
Why do I get the sinking feeling that a sub-£250 UB-820EB is now sliding further and further from my view?
Ain’t happening. I finally bought a region-free 820 yesterday after talking myself out of the price for years.
(Not my first region-free player, but it is my first region-free 4K Blu-ray player.)
You might get lucky, In 5 years you might be able to snag one for $20 at Goodwill.
We bought one new for $250 around 6 or 7 years ago, and a few days later we found an even better model at the thrift store for $10! We returned the new one the next day. Thrift stores kick ass, although their prices have definitely increased since the pandemic.
Media companies are hate physical media…
They almost got away with it but netflix enshitification got many people to wake up to where we are going.
Hoard that shit!
When’s the last time they updated them, 2018?