High Dynamic Ranger

TODAY’S ULTRA HD BLU-RAY player market is drastically smaller than the one for the spinning-disc machines of old. In my early days reviewing DVD players, I could literally enter an electronics store, walk out with over a dozen players, and that would only represent a sampling of the available models. But with the massive rise in the popularity of streaming, we’ve seen the player market continue to slim down. On the plus side, the quality of the UHD Blu-ray players we’ve seen has been uniformly good. Granted the quality of the disc media is fantastic, so in the end the player just needs to pass that data along to the display with as little manipulation as possible.

For this review we’re going to look at a new UHD Blu-ray player from Panasonic that actually does quite a bit of manipulation, but for good reason. Panasonic’s DMP-UB820 is the first player to offer advanced onboard tone mapping for High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) playback. The HDR Optimizer feature found in the DMP-UB820 was designed to correct the HDR troubles of displays that either don’t support HDR or don’t do a great job with it. The UB820 is also the first player I’m aware of that supports the