Streaming or discs
Contents
So the Sony UBP-X800M2 can play movies from a network as well as from discs and USB sticks. That blu-ray discs work, may speak for itself. However, the Sony also ‘eats’ almost all the rips that we have made (and have downloaded from friends). Including ISO files. Surely this is good news for people that archive their blu-rays. It’s rare that we don’t have audio (some Dolby codecs are difficult… but only for downloads).
The quality we see on screen with our Optoma UHZ65-4k Laser projector depends entirely on the quality of the rip. The better the rip, the better the quality. That makes sense. Blu-ray almost always looks good. Though we have to say, our nVidia Shield seemed to scale a bit better sometimes. The Sony sometimes looked a bit grainy when scaling 1080P to 4K. So the nVidia Shield just seems to be doing a little better than that. Sony might be able to do that a bit tighter in an update. But as said, the better the quality of the source, the tighter this player processes the picture.
Tight!
And if everything is right – say with a modern 4K video – then the Sony plays magisterially well. We see loads of details and also with (fast) movement a lot of control. Qualities that help to get a complete film experience.
We have played a lot of movies and live concerts in the period of a few months that we play with the Sony. All with excellent results and without problems. As mentioned before: very occasionally the Sony didn’t pick up the soundtrack (Dolby Digital issue?), but with the better streams – DTS HD-MA, Atmos, DTS-X and Dolby TrueHD – we didn’t have a problem at all. Yet an excellent performance for a player of 299 euro retail.