Alternatives to Playstation 4 as a Blu-Ray source?

[Hereward]

Hello. After a 10 year pause I am getting interested in home cinema once again.

I currently use my kids' PS4 to play Blu-Ray discs. The rest of the system is a Denon AVR-2809 receiver, a 50" Pioneer Kuro plasma, 7.1 B&W bookshelf speakers with BK Monolith sub-woofer (yes, it's a circa 2009 timewarp!)

I recall reading that the PS4 is a perfectly decent source but just wondering if there are any new players that are worth spending the money on, or would it be totally pointless unless upgrading the rest of the system?

Basically looking for an excuse to buy a decent Blu-Ray player up to £300. If the player can do the decoding that would be great since the Denon is pretty obsolete I expect. I am very rusty in my knowledge and not up to date with the latest audio formats.

Thanks for any recommendations.

[Radec]

I'm not sure it's worth it tbh as your TV is hd only and your amp doesn't do Atmos, I'd stick with the PS4 as it's meant to be a really good player.
If you were to upgrade your TV and amp later on then there are a few offerings from Panasonic and Sony that will come in on budget.

At the moment you may be able to pick up an second hand older model Oppo blu ray player from eBay for around that price, they have been regarded as one of the, if not best blu ray players going in the AV world.
Although they have stopped making them.

I'm not sure what you want to gain from changing from the PS4 but if in main it's picture quality then if you haven't already get your Kuro professionally calibrated.
It will still look naturally better than most TVs barring top end OLEDs

[Hereward]

Thanks. Yes, I think that's the boring but correct answer. Once the TV dies and I get a fancy new 4K jobbie then I can take it from there with worthwhile upgrades.

Good point on the display calibration.

[lostmotel]

Not sure if I was doing something wrong, but when I got my PS4 Pro I figured it could replace my PS3 for Bluray duties. Games looked absolutely fine on the PS4 but films looked awful compared to the PS3 in terms of colour reproduction.

As we have a 4K TV though I ended up getting a Panasonic UB400 for 4K discs. This has the trick Panasonic colour processing and advanced chroma upsampling which certainly made a difference even on regular Blurays. The upscaling even does a pretty good job with DVDs (I have a lot of old boxsets which haven't made it to Bluray).

Your plasma has HDMI 1.3 so should be able to accept a 4:4:4 signal so you get the benefit of the newer processing techniques.

Looks like Panasonic have dumbed down the new range, but the DP-UB820 has the latest HCX processor and is £279.

[Zirconia]

Using a panasonic 4k player myself and the HDR optimiser is an absolute gem if you upgrade to an OLED. Optimiser is not on all Panny models.

If upgrading to 4k, don't get conned into expensive HDMI leads.

[Hereward]

lostmotel said:

...Looks like Panasonic have dumbed down the new range, but the DP-UB820 has the latest HCX processor and is £279.

Ooh, this looks interesting. It has analogue 7.1 audio outputs so I can let it do the processing onboard and bypass the Denon processing.

Thanks guys.