hey everybody it's Lon Seidman and we're back with my home theater talker series
where we've been looking at my home theater upgrade upstairs and this all
began about last December when I got the LG OLED television
I bought a 65 inch TV which I absolutely love and I've been trying to find the
most economical way to get really high quality 4k video to that set so of
course we've got the Nvidia shield that's been doing a good job of that but
there are a lot of movies now that are using Dolby vision like the Star Wars
movie here that I can't rip out to a file and play through that Nvidia shield
at the best possible quality so that set us off on an adventure to find the right
4k blu-ray player and I went into this kind of blind in the sense that I didn't
do a lot of research prior to buying my players so the first one I went with was
the Xbox One S and I needed to get an Xbox One S anyhow for some stuff here on the
channel so I figured hey this might be a good way to kill two birds with one
stone and get a decent playback device that could do everything I need but as
we saw in the initial video it didn't quite stack up has no dolby vision
support it's incredibly noisy and it's not outputting video properly for the
best color replication on screen so that one was tossed out then we went to the
Oppo blu-ray player which was awesome but that player is very expensive about
500 or $600 it's getting discontinued so it's not going to be around all that
much longer and I felt like you know budget wise it was kind of overkill for
what my needs were so I went out about a month or two ago now and bought this
player from Sony this is the Sony ubp X 700 it's $200 so very affordable at
least in comparison to some of the other stuff we've been looking at here in the
4k series and it actually is meeting my needs and the only reason why I didn't
review it earlier was that they didn't have the Dolby vision update available
for it yet so when I bought it it didn't support Dolby vision but now it does it
has had a firmware update get pushed down to it so we're going to take a look
at this player and tell you what I think of it in this video we'll look through
some of its interfaces and explore some of the ways you
can use it with your own 4k home theater but I do wanna let you know in the
interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds all the
opinions are about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review and no
one has reviewed what you're about to see before I uploaded it so let's get
into it now and see what this cheaper player is all about so let's take a
closer look now at the hardware this is not a very well built device in fact it
feels very Hollow and cheap a lot like what you would expect from a
commoditized blu-ray player you might buy at the department store so it
certainly doesn't have the Oppo real heavy-duty feel but playback quality is
really all that I cared about and it seems to be doing that just fine the
disk goes in over here there's a door that will pop open when you eject the
tray that will flop back up there you've got an eject button and a power button
here you can connect up your external storage to the USB port here it'll play
back pretty much anything actually within reason including lossless audio
like flak or AIFF or wav so if you've got some high quality audio you can play
that back here along with your mpeg-2 and mpeg-4 video I'm pretty sure it
supports HEVC stuff as well on the back here you've got the power that goes in
right there here is your LAN port for connecting it up to Ethernet it's 100
megabit but that's good enough for most of what you're going to throw at this
player over the network it does have a bunch of apps which we'll take a look at
in a few minutes too because the remote has the Netflix button on there of
course I'll talk more about the remote in a few minutes it does have Wi-Fi
built in it's a B G and n it is not AC so my advice always if you can plug it
in via ethernet now you'll notice there are two HDMI ports here on the back
because this player like the Oppo has the ability to send the audio out
through a separate port and this is important because if you have an older
receiver that doesn't support 4k video you can still use that older receiver so
what you do is run video out to your new TV over here run this cable out to your
receiver for audio so you can get your lossless audio working without having to
upgrade the receiver and as you all know from my previous episode
I upgraded my receiver before I bought one of these players and I didn't really
need to because I could have just bought one of these dual HDMI outputs and been
done with it it does have the ability to adjust the
audio delay so if your audio is a little bit out of sync you can adjust the delay
inside the player to make sure the video and audio sync up for other forms of
surround sound the non lossless forms you can run a coax digital out to your
receiver as well on this but that's it for ports if you don't have HDMI you're
gonna be out of luck but I think for the most part if you've got your fancy new
4k TV it's going to support that we did see on the Oppo player that it had more
options for audio output so for example it could actually decode the audio and
run it out to your receiver with a straight cable this will not do that of
course but again for my needs I didn't need anything all that fancy and all
that extra stuff and cost really wasn't necessary here's the remote and it's a
tiny little remote and not a great one I think it does support HDMI CEC so you
can use your existing remote controls if you wish to control it not much to the
remote here other than it being rather small it's not backlit of course and you
got your Netflix button there because Netflix paid to put that button on there
I'd love to see how much money they've paid over the years to get these buttons
enabled on it so that is it for the hardware pretty simple stuff here what
we're gonna do now is hook up my display and we'll see what you can do with this
player so here is the main menu of your blu-ray player not a lot to look at here
kind of a Spartan interface but there are a few apps you might already have
these apps on your fancy new television but if you don't they're on here and you
should be able to gain access to some of the more popular video services out
there you can also gain access to your blu-ray discs here this is for your USB
Drive if you have one plugged in this is a mirror casting feature where you can
screen mirror a PC or an Android device to the player so if you want something
on here really quickly in a wireless fashion you can do that there isn't much
to choose from on the app front though you can see it's a very limited app
selection you also have the ability to play things over the network with the
media server application here which I will show you in detail in
just a second the Netflix experience I found to be pretty good it does playback
HDR video properly along with the 4k stuff the issue though I was running
into with this is that every time you change something on the menu the screen
blanks out and then it loads up the trailer that runs in line with the menu
here and if I switch to Star Trek Voyager here for example the same thing
will happen it'll go blank and then the trailer begins once again so I think
this might be the video mode switching on the player which is what I want it to
do and it's going out of a menu and switching to some video and it must be
adjusting the framerate or something so they've got to work on that a little bit
but once the video is up and running everything I found was working just fine
on it Amazon Prime video looks the same as it does on other devices HDR wasn't
working for me though on prime video YouTube was fine same interface as we've
seen on everything else and it appeared to work as I expected it to it even at
4k at 60 Hertz so if you lack a good YouTube client or a good any one of
these clients this might be a good supplement for that now I was surprised
that this player handles blu-ray mkv files over the network better than the
oppo did as we saw in the original video the oppo would take an exceptionally
long period of time to spin those movies up and they were often freezing and not
working correctly so far this one's been a little bit better at least with the
1080p stuff so I can go into that little media playback application it
immediately found all of the available DLNA media sources on my network if
you've got one of these newer network-attached storage devices like a
WD my cloud or a Synology they all have DLNA servers built in and you can see
just how quickly over the Ethernet network it's able to browse what's going
on there so I'm going to go pick out a Star Wars movie here real quick and load
that up and see how it works now I'm finding that generally it's taking about
anywhere from 20 to 45 seconds for one of these movies to spin up here so if we
go and look at my least favorite movie here attack of the clones you'll see
you'll get this little spinning wheel here for a bit
on the oppo this thing went on forever this one will hopefully come up a little
bit quicker than that it is switching
the player into 24p mode for these movies and it's passing over the
lossless audio too so all those things have been good but you will have to wait
a little bit for these movies to come up by comparison when we were on the Nvidia
shield with Plex or with Kodi these movies spin up immediately so there is a
little bit of a lag here to get the movie started but once it does start it
seems to be playing back as I would expect it to so I don't think it's a
replacement for my Nvidia shield by any stretch but it could be a good
supplement if I don't have an extra one available or something or you just don't
want to have to go through the process of buying additional boxes this should
at least do your blu-ray 1080p rips ok the issue though I'm having with it is
with the 4k blu-ray rips those are locking the player up completely to the
point where I had to unplug it and plug it back in so I think 1080p is about the
best you're gonna do with your blu-ray rips here but it does do a better job
than the Oppo did with them so not too bad on that front let's take a look now
at playing discs the old-fashioned way so we are now ready for disc playback
and I can take out my blu-ray here of the Star Wars movie and pop that in I
don't have a Dolby vision display but this did work just fine upstairs on my
OLED television it switched in the Dolby vision mode properly my other non Dolby
vision movies worked just fine as well it switched into that proper color space
so it does all the switching just fine here I was really quite pleased with
that now this monitor here although a 4k
monitor is not an HDR monitor but the player here is converting the HDR video
to non HDR here on the display so things are looking fine so if you have a 4k TV
but don't have the HDR capability the movies won't look all that distorted
they won't look ideal but they will certainly look better than they would if
it didn't have that ability to convert back down to a standard color space so I
was pleased to see that too out of a relatively inexpensive player here now
if you get this player and you don't get Dolby vision right away there's a couple
of things that you have to do the first is connect it up to the internet so that
you can get your update downloaded for that Dolby vision support
because it wasn't on many of these players up until about a few weeks ago
so I'm guessing there's a lot out in the channel that still don't yet have this
capability so the first thing you want to do is go into your setup menu and run
the software update it'll download I think two or three different files it
takes about five or ten minutes for it to conduct that update and once it's
done you'll be good to go now once you get the update and reboot you need to go
over to your screen settings and in here you'll have the option to turn on Dolby
vision output that is off by default mainly because most people don't have
Dolby vision TVs apparently so you'll need to turn that on specifically to get
it to work but you don't have to turn it off if the movie doesn't support it I'm
finding it switches into the proper modes depending on what the movie has
but if you so somehow I wanted to watch the Star Wars movie in HD are ten and
not in Dolby vision you will need to disable that feature first but for any
movie that supports HDR and not Dolby vision it will correctly switch into HDR
so I'm finding in my experience so far that the Dolby vision HDR looks better
than the standard HDR 10 so for me I have just left this setting on and any
movie that supports that Dolby vision is going to get it on my TV set here the
other thing I suggest adjusting here is the 24p output mode what I found here
for the data content was that if it was switched to off because I was streaming
some stuff over my network I wanted it to switch into that mode so I turned it
on auto for that and the same went for the network content so I moved that over
to auto so that I could get that 24p mode to play back on here so just two
settings here that I think you need to do to get the best performance out of
the player and you'll be good to go it is a very quiet player there's no fan on
it the disc is a little bit noisier than the Oppo player was but in listening to
my movie with the player across the room for me I really didn't hear it operating
so I think you won't have any real interruption of your entertainment here
with the player running so I have to say I am quite pleased with this purchase
probably should have started here first but in fairness the Dolby vision support
wasn't yet available for this player when I first embarked on this journey
this firmware update just came out over the last maybe week or two so it's good
to now have that capability I can play back my dolby vision movies the way I
want and I didn't break the bank to get there there is a player I believe that
costs a little less than this one from Philips that one is about 175 dollars on
Amazon right now it also has the dual HDMI output for those of you that have
the older receivers it also has optical audio out too I haven't tried that one
so I can't comment on its video quality versus this one but I would imagine it's
probably going to be pretty close I did hear it's a little more Spartan than
this one is so you might want to take a look at that one if another 15 dollars
is important to the budget there but overall again with this $200 player I
think it's going to be just fine for most people who are in a similar
situation to me where they don't need the best but they need something decent
and this is certainly decent so I think that's gonna do it at the moment for the
home theater series I am sure I'll be diving into it more as some of the
Nvidia shield updates come out and we get better color switching and whatnot
so we'll be coming back to this but I think for the moment at least from a hardware
standpoint I have everything I need right now but I would love to get some
feedback from all of you on some maybe new topics to cover that I didn't cover
in the course of the other videos so let me know down in the comments below and
we'll keep this little series going here over the course of the year until next
time this is Lon Seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you
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