Intro
Contents
Music has completely switched to streaming for many users. There are countless interesting services with tens of millions of tracks to offer. For video it certainly goes that way too. Although it’s a little more complex there. Not everything can be found at one service. That makes it difficult for a lot of enthusiasts. Maybe that’s why blu-ray players can still be found among the bigger brands. Sony offers with the UBD-X800M2 a player that eats almost everything. We’re gonna have a good time… movie time!
We tested the X800 a while back. The ‘M2’ version seems at first sight to be an equal player with a slightly different name. But that’s not entirely true. Though the differences aren’t huge, Dolby Vision, for example, is one… and for many cinema enthusiasts, that’s important. The media player has also been slightly modified.
When it comes to connections, we detect no surprises. On the back we find a double hdmi port (one 2.0 for UHD + sound, one 1.4 for sound). The reason is that not all soundbars or receivers can handle hdmi 2.0. You can then potentially separate audio and video so that you can enjoy Dolby Vision, 4K + all that beauty, on the screen and the audio can be forwarded to a receiver. Incidentally, certain formats will only remain available via the main output. Think Dolby Atmos and DTS-X.
We also see coaxial for those who go really retro (for cincema coaxial is only suitable for older standards), Ethernet, wifi and USB on the front behind a flap. Wifi won’t really be used much, because it’s Wifi N. And whoever has tried to stream films with Wifi-N: good luck with that. Maybe it could be used for Youtube and Netflix, but a blu-ray rip on Wifi-N… we don’t recommend that.
Menu
The menu of the UBP-X800M2 is very minimalistic. In fact, there are four icons; disc, usb, network and settings. Including Netflix and YouTube. That makes it very easy to make a choice. But before you go directly to the movies, we recommend you go through the menu. There are several settings that are interesting for a nicer and better experience of film and music. Think of Dolby Vision, HDR, upconversion of stereo, color range, etcetera. Here you can also force updates and show or hide certain media servers. Useful if you have multiple libraries in the network.
