Clinging to physical media for movie collecting has become an increasingly difficult prospect in this age of plentiful and convenient video streaming. First and foremost, the very idea of collecting movies for permanent ownership has fallen out of favor with the general public. Even for those of us hardliners who refuse to give up our shiny optical discs, the hardware we use to play them has gotten scarcer and sadly less reliable over time. After resisting for longer than I probably should have, I recently added a second 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player to my home theater system. I wish this weren’t necessary, but having done so, I thought it might be worthwhile to share some thoughts on my rationale and my initial impression of the results.

I’m a collector by nature, with something of a hoarding instinct that I struggle to control. This extends beyond just my obsession with movies, as you can see in photos from the walkthrough tour of my home theater that I posted when I started this site. Nevertheless, movies are my primary passion, and I like owning a library of titles I can keep on hand for whenever I feel the desire to watch them, with no fear of specific films shuffling around or suddenly disappearing from the many streaming platforms I also subscribe to. While I know that buying movies digitally is also an option, I stubbornly prefer physical media – specifically Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray – for its higher quality lossless audio and (usually) better video. I also simply enjoy the tactile experience of handling a disc and putting it into the player, much as vinyl record collectors feel about music.

I’ve owned a number of Blu-ray players since home video moved into the high-definition era, starting with the very first model ever available for public purchase in July of 2006, the junky Samsung BD-P1000. That player was burdened with non-defeatable Digital Noise Reduction softening the picture at all times, and I gladly replaced it at the first opportunity. Over the years, when they were available, I was a brand loyalist for a company called OPPO Digital, which made some of the highest-quality, most-reliable DVD and Blu-ray players, packed with niche usage features that catered directly to my needs. I loved every OPPO player I ever owned, and still keep a few of them around the house. Regrettably, OPPO Digital’s parent company made a business decision to exit the home theater market back in 2018, and discontinued support for its disc players a couple years after that.

Before that happened, model UDP-203 was OPPO’s flagship 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player, first released at the end of 2016. I acquired one before upgrading to a 4K projector, and the player has remained central to my home theater system for several years. In general, the UDP-203 is a very reliable workhorse machine, and I’ve watched many hundreds of Blu-ray and 4K discs on it without issue. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case and my experience using the OPPO 203 has proven problematic with some titles.

Readers who follow my ramblings may have noticed me complaining about glitchy disc playback from time to time, where my player will freeze up in the middle of a movie and refuse to read the entire disc. This happens most often on 4K Ultra HD discs, though I’ve run into it on a couple regular Blu-rays as well. When this happens, no amount of cleaning the disc ever improves anything. Most of the time, replacing the disc with a new copy resolves the problem. However, I’ve been through two copies of The Karate Kid that stall out in different places, and two copies of Tron that won’t progress more than a single minute into the movie.

I should note that this experience is not uncommon, nor is it specific to the OPPO UDP-203. Stories of frequent disc playback errors are common to just about every brand and model of 4K Ultra HD player. Because of that, I’ve long resisted the well-meaning advice of readers and friends who’ve suggested that I replace my 4K player. Seemingly no other model has a much better track record than the one I already owned.

I finally broke down recently when the Black Friday sale price on a Panasonic DP-UB820-K fell within a range I was comfortable paying, or at least less uncomfortable than the regular non-Black Friday price. With OPPO out of the home theater business, this particular Panasonic model (and its DP-UB9000 “reference class” counterpart at twice the price) is the most often recommended for a high-quality and mostly-reliable 4K Ultra HD player. That’s not to say I haven’t seen any complaints about glitchy disc playback with the DP-UB820. In fact, I’ve seen quite a lot of them, just fewer than most other brands or models.

I didn’t buy the Panasonic DP-UB820 to replace my OPPO 203, but rather to supplement it for those times when the OPPO gives me trouble. For several reasons, I still consider the OPPO to be my primary disc player, and the Panasonic a backup.

It isn’t my intention to provide a full review of the DP-UB820 player in this article, just some quick first impressions. To that end, with its small form factor (half the depth of the OPPO or any other disc player I own) and the way the unit’s entire front faceplate flips down to eject the disc tray rather than a dedicated drawer, the UB820 feels cheaply made. It also lacks some features that I wouldn’t personally plan to use anyway, such as higher-grade DACs for analog audio output. (I prefer to use HDMI and let my A/V receiver do that work.) If someone felt those were dealbreaker issues, I suppose that’s who the more expensive DP-UB9000 model is designed to cater to. The video and audio quality through HDMI should otherwise use the same components and have equivalent quality between the two models.

The UB820 has one of the worst remote controls I’ve ever encountered on a consumer electronics device. The button layout isn’t intuitive at all, and it has a giant NETFLIX button sitting right on top of the much smaller (yet much more frequently used) UP directional button, as if intentionally designed to trick you into hitting the wrong button and jumping to Netflix whether you want it or not.

I have no intention of ever using Netflix or any other streaming feature in this player. I have much better dedicated streaming devices for that. But I’ve already hit that button by mistake at least thirty times in the week I’ve owned this unit, and every time I do so, the player takes about three solid minutes before it will let me back out of Netflix and return to disc playback options. I find this absolutely infuriating.

I wish it were still possible to program this player’s remote codes into the Harmony universal remote I’ve had for ages and love, but Logitech discontinued support for the Harmony line. Failing that, I’ve been informed that the remotes for Panasonic models UB900 and UB9000 both have more sensible button layouts than this one and are fully compatible with the UB820. I’ll need to seek out one of those remotes on the used market in the near future.

In addition to the lousy remote, I’m not particularly fond of Panasonic’s on-screen user interface, either. It has too many confusing HDR setup options that don’t seem to make a clear difference no matter which one I select. At the default, 4K HDR picture quality appears dimmer through the Panasonic UB820 than through my OPPO 203. I’m sure there’s a way to fix that, but I’ll need to do more research to figure it out.

What About Disc Playback?

Now, for the most pertinent issue and the reason I bought this second 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player in the first place: I’ve tested every disc I can remember giving me playback errors in the past, and the UB820 seems to read through all the known problematic scenes that froze up in my OPPO 203. I even watched about fifteen minutes of Tron without any hangups, whereas the OPPO can barely get past the main menu screen before totally glitching out.

With that said, I haven’t yet watched any of these movies in full from start to finish. I’ve only had time to test specific scenes that I know caused problems in the OPPO. Also, on the day after I received and installed this Panasonic player, I went online and almost immediately ran across another owner complaining that his own UB820 froze up on him while watching the recently-released F1: The Movie. I don’t have that disc to test, myself, but reports like that leave me wary of assuming this player will be a miracle cure-all to all my disc playback problems.

I have my own theories as to why 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray seems to be far more error-prone than standard Blu-ray or DVD before it (much less streaming). A 4K disc packs way more data into the same physical space as a Blu-ray, and as a result is far less tolerant of even small defects or imperfections on the playback surface. Even a tiny scratch or scuff, or an improper buildup of the protective coating applied at the factory, can cause a player’s laser to misread those data pits and lands. Added to that, quality control at the few remaining optical disc pressing plants left in the world has taken a notable downturn, as the volume of titles waiting to be manufactured exceeds the resources and capabilities of the machinery churning them out.

Every optical disc player has error correction circuitry intended to compensate for data read failures, but some brands and models have better error correction than others. In the case of my OPPO, which hasn’t been supported by the manufacturer in years, I suspect that its firmware for that function is out of date. In an ideal world, every optical disc would be manufactured and handled perfectly, and not require any form of error correction, but I fear that’s not a realistic expectation for the current state of the industry.

As such, I’m left in the position of feeling I need to keep two 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray players, from different brands and manufacturers, in active use. Between the two of them, I can only hope that any disc that gives me problems in one player will work in the other.

Of course, none of this speaks well for the long-term viability of physical media as a movie collecting format. Frankly, it shouldn’t be this difficult. I’ll be the first to admit that streaming is all-around easier, and generally more reliable… until your internet service goes down, anyway.

Regardless, I’m still a physical media fan and will stick with it to the bitter end. I love owning these shiny discs. If I have to jump through hoops to get some more life out of them, so be it.