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Are blu-ray players still worth buying?

Milt

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And I may have been (and still am) lucky as my 103, 105 and 205 seem to function flawlessly.
Not meaning to patronize Kal, although far more often than not I agree with his assessments,
Oppos are widely known for their build quality, reliability, customer support & open to feedback.
I've owned and do own Oppos since the beginning, best all around players I know of.
If anyone has had an issue, you're in the minority & would be taken care of.
Currently have an Oppo-80, 203 and 2 205's.
Make of that what you will.
 

Palladium

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I for one don't care enough for better video quality or traditional media delivery to justify spending on dedicated blu-ray gear.
 

Frank Dernie

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Not meaning to patronize Kal, although far more often than not I agree with his assessments,
Oppos are widely known for their build quality, reliability, customer support & open to feedback.
I've owned and do own Oppos since the beginning, best all around players I know of.
If anyone has had an issue, you're in the minority & would be taken care of.
Currently have an Oppo-80, 203 and 2 205's.
Make of that what you will.
Kal was replying to me, actually.
Neither my BDP-95 nor 105 played discs flawlessly with more skipping or blanks that any other player I have used.
My current Sony 1000 is flawless.
 

direstraitsfan98

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Wish I could buy a 205 for list price brand new -.-
I may wind buying a Sony PS5 as my new 4K player since there are no similar rock solid alternatives to the Oppo 203 and 205. What a sad state of affairs.
 

Frank Dernie

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Wish I could buy a 205 for list price brand new -.-
I may wind buying a Sony PS5 as my new 4K player since there are no similar rock solid alternatives to the Oppo 203 and 205. What a sad state of affairs.
Depends what you want it for.
The Oppos have, apparently, good DACs built in and loads of inputs and outputs.
If you wish to play blu-rays and surround audio discs using a preamp with room compensation you will only be using the HDMI output. I have only used one other blu-ray player since the Oppos and for blurays it is certainly better than my Oppos are.
 

Wombat

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If you have a collection of Blu-ray discs you need a Blu-ray player. The players will become obsolete but your discs will remain. It is a good time to buy a back-up player or two - used or new.
 

Sal1950

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I have a cheap Samsung UBD-K8500 that I bought three years ago to do 4k, UHD and HDR video. It's worked flawlessly for me with dual HDMI outs, one to TV and one to Marantz pre-pro. Had a cheapo Sammy before that, Samsung BD-E5300, with the same flawless operation until I gave it away. I bought a used Sony BDP-S5100 some time back for $50 to rip SACD's, works without issue for that. ;)
 

Sal1950

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The players will become obsolete
I hope none to soon. Discs are still the only reasonable way to enjoy movies with SOTA video and audio.
Red Box rents for $1.99 a night. Then later sells the discs very cheaply. ;)
 

direstraitsfan98

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Depends what you want it for.
The Oppos have, apparently, good DACs built in and loads of inputs and outputs.
If you wish to play blu-rays and surround audio discs using a preamp with room compensation you will only be using the HDMI output. I have only used one other blu-ray player since the Oppos and for blurays it is certainly better than my Oppos are.
Are you referring to your "Sony 1000"? I'll have to take a look into that one. Thanks. Why do you like it so much?
The reason I favour the Oppo so much is I really value the bulkier, chunkier look and the more solid build quality. I have bad experience with cheaper 4K players and I'm convinced that the chassis needs to weigh enough to keep disk noise down. With some 4K discs I have they get as loud as a jet engine. And from my research all the Sony's and LG's and Panasonic players from 2017 had same issue. Does the Sony 1000 fix this?
 

Frank Dernie

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Are you referring to your "Sony 1000"? I'll have to take a look into that one. Thanks. Why do you like it so much?
The reason I favour the Oppo so much is I really value the bulkier, chunkier look and the more solid build quality. I have bad experience with cheaper 4K players and I'm convinced that the chassis needs to weigh enough to keep disk noise down. With some 4K discs I have they get as loud as a jet engine. And from my research all the Sony's and LG's and Panasonic players from 2017 had same issue. Does the Sony 1000 fix this?
The reason I like it is reliability. I would prefer more buttons on the machine rather than just the remote but it just works.
There is nothing worse when watching a good film than the transport skipping, freezing or stopping.
Both my Oppos did that.
For me reliability is the most important aspect of a piece of kit.
 

A800

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If you want reliability you also need redundancy.
 

Sancus

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I hope none to soon. Discs are still the only reasonable way to enjoy movies with SOTA video and audio.
Red Box rents for $1.99 a night. Then later sells the discs very cheaply. ;)

Technically not always true. There are films that are only available in HDR10 on disc, but are Dolby Vision on streaming(Mad Max Fury Road, for example) w/Atmos. iTunes' 25Mbps 4K bitrate and 770kbps audio bitrates are good enough to make a good DV grade look better than a less-compressed HDR10 version.
 

LightninBoy

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For people on a budget during this crisis ...
https://www.engadget.com/4k-bluray-player-sony-140048838.html

UDP-800 is the one I bought too a few years ago. Don't remember the exact price, but I'm sure it was < $250. Absolutely dirt cheap considering all the functionality (CD, SACD, DVD, DVDA, Bluray, 4k, streaming, etc. etc. )

I got into the Oppo BDP-83 first production units which I thought were post beta. I was so excited, but it was clearly not ready for primetime. Video was fine, but CD/SACD playback had operational issues. Sound from its analogue outputs was subjectively mid-fi. I was very unpopular on the AVS owner forums for not parroting the narrative that this unit was perfect. Of course the same ones critical of me, fell all over themselves praising the improvements when Oppo took the analogue output seriously with the BDP-83SE. Anyways, I ended up returning the BDP-83 and the customer service experience was good.

It seemed like Oppo really improved with the following generations of bluray players, and I would've tried them again had the stars aligned. But after a few expensive disk spinners broke down, my philosophy shifted to just getting commodity hardware that retrieved the bits from the disk formats I cared about. Hence the Sony UDP-800 purchase.
 

FrantzM

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The perspective depends on where the person is...

Where I live, Internet access is "very fast" when it clocks at 8 Mb/s .. It usually hovers around 4 Mb/s .. This is good enough for Redbook Audiol and regular HD movies , HD Movies through Netflix and Amazon are heavily compressed and I often see color banding... This last from a few seconds to minutes before the scenes return to something "normal"... thanks to the magic of buffering ...
"Interstellar" is one of my favorite moves and a workout for your sound system.. puny subwoofers and or mains incapable of serious output in the audio band please abstain .. stay home!! ... Interstellar on my system through Amazon Prime is inferior by a wide margin to INTERSTELLAR (had to shout) on my lowly $75 HD Samsung BD Player. Soundwise I am not sure there are any differences, picture-wise, to use an audiophile cliché: Night and Day, especially in the night scenes which usually lead to banding with Amazon or Netflix.

4 K is my next step, perhaps Atmos.. I can't get these, where I live , on streaming. I am getting a BS 4 K player, Budget is $150 ,, Sony, Samsung, LG? They have to be heavily discounted these days. Where?
 
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JustAnandaDourEyedDude

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Clearly, Blu-ray (including 4K UHD) is in its death throes, as far as sales of BDs and consequently new models of Blu-ray players go. Streaming has won, and is the present and future of video. As a form of distribution to the consumer, streaming is cheaper and the content is better protected against piracy, and so a winner for the content owners. For the consumer, streaming is more convenient and a one-time rental or monthly subscription is cheaper than buying players and tons of DVDs or Blu-rays for most content that gets watched only once. One can also "buy" online-served videos (which is more a fixed-price permanent rental, really) for content one intends to watch repeatedly.

Most major player manufacturers have announced that they will not be designing any new standalone Blu-ray players. They will continue to make and sell existing models as long as it is profitable enough. I think players for integration into (desktop) computers will be made for longer than that, though eventually optical drives will be phased out even there. For those of us left holding a bunch of treasured DVDs and HD/UHD Blu-rays that we spent enormous sums acquiring, we can only hope for perhaps one last round of player updates from a couple of manufacturers to get the best out of our optical discs. And of course stockpile a few players for when they are no longer manufactured. I was in no rush to update to 4K UHD, and was caught entirely off-guard by Oppo's exit from Blu-ray players. I finally bought the Sony UBP-X800M2 this January for US$220 from a brick-and-mortar. It has been fine so far. The "Mark 2" is important, as it refers to the inclusion of Dolby Vision decoding primarily. Some resellers on Amazon are still selling the X800 which is the "Mark 1", so beware.

Dynamic HDR capability to decode Dolby Vision and HDR10+ (not just HDR10 which scales the luminance of each frame based on a (static) single average luminance for an entire movie, and not based on average luminance (dynamic) calculated per frame) are I think important features to look for in a player, if you have or plan to buy a bunch of 4K UHD Blu-rays with dynamic HDR content. I only have a 1080p TV as yet, but I have read and heard that HDR makes more of an impact than 4K vs 1080p, in TVs that support it. It is unclear which of the two competing specs will win out or whether they will co-exist for a long while. DV has the momentum in number of titles and uses 12-bit color, but HDR10+ while using 10-bit color is license-fee-free for all concerned. So I would hope for release of players that support both, to be future-proof. While the X800M2 supports DV and HDR10, I do not think it supports HDR10+, but I might be mistaken. Of course, DV and HDR10+ make not a whit of difference for DVDs and HD Blu-rays, which do not encode HDR. The content, the player and the TV must all support HDR for it to provide a benefit.

Those of us, like me, who missed out on the Oppo UDP-205, may be tempted to rewrite the past by buying one of the US$1000 Panasonic DP-UB9000, the US$1000 Pioneer Elite UDP-LX500, and the GBP 2200 Pioneer Elite UDP-LX800 (the last apparently not for sale in the US). Per professional and user reviews, the video processing on these is said to rival or surpass that of the UDP-205, and one can tap the digital audio out to an audio system effectively as good as what the UDP-205 would give you. I forget whether all three of those players support both DV and HDR10+, or whether Panasonic and Pioneer plan to update the firmware to those capabilities. Availability of the Pioneer models seems low, so perhaps Pioneer is in the process of issuing revised models. Buying such an expensive player would perhaps be a last act of folly before resigning oneself to the inevitability of streamed content, of which the availability and particulars (example: bowdlerized versions) and cost can be variable for better or worse.
 
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Sal1950

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Correct. AFAIK the easiest way to do that is using Sonore iso2dsd app.
There's also SACD Extract, some claim it's faster and has a wider list of features. I've used both and don't notice much difference but iso2dsd seems simpler to use.
 

Astrozombie

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Still worth it, I tried transitioning to Vudu because my movie Discs were taking up too much space, but I've run in to some glitches.
Imagine buying a new TV, an Xbox One just for its 4K capabilities and then renting a movie only to be told "You need to reduce the quality to HDX" :mad:I had already bought a handful of movies on the platform but now I will try to get the disc if I can.

On another player Vudu just froze in the middle of watching a TV episode, it's sad to see how many players have iffy reviews. (Including this Samsung and the Sony we had before it) I had to unplug it for 30 seconds and plug it back in.

If i need another player in the future I think I'll look for a high-end one but used on ebay.
 
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