Someone Polled 4K Blu-ray Player Owners About the Reliability of Different Models Over Time, and There's a Clear Winner

Nearly 400 4K Blu-ray Users Shared Information About Player Issues
There is a huge gap between the best and the worst in the survey
Panasonic will be happy; sony not so much

One of the things I love most about Reddit is the way people share their experiences with specific products: whether it’s a kitchen knife, a portable air conditioner, or a Gibson guitar, I know I’ll be able to find sage advice on what to buy and what to pay attention to. And now the good folks at r/hometheater have gotten together to talk about the best 4K Blu-ray players and their reliability.

The poll was conducted by r/hometheater poster “requieminadream” and generated nearly 400 responses (almost double the number of previous respondents) from r/4KBluray, r/Bluray, r/PhysicalMediaMatters, the AVS forums, and the Blu-ray.com forums. And there are some very clear differences between Blu-ray devices from different companies.

Requieminadream very kindly summed up the results in one sentence: “The Sony UBP-X700 is still the problem, the Panasonic DP-UB820 is still the champion, and the expensive UB-9000 had the cleanest numbers (albeit a small sample size).”

Which 4K Blu-ray players are the best?

One of the reasons I like Reddit wisdom is because, with few exceptions, reviewers can’t spend years with the products they test, so my car reviews don’t know about the software problems that drive me crazy and sometimes require a restart at traffic lights, and my router reviews don’t know about its tendency to misbehave every few weeks.

The same goes for Blu-ray players: not even the most in-depth review will be able to tell you whether a player is likely to pack its bags in the second or third year. (Though one exception is our Panasonic DP-UB820 review, written by our senior TV hardware writer, James Davidson, because he wrote us a new review based on a mix of usage in our test room.) and having used it daily for several years before.)

But overall, surveys like this are a brilliant resource.

By a wide margin, the Panasonic DP-UB820 is the community’s favorite player: 43.4% of respondents own one, and its problem rate was about half that of the Sony UBP-X700. The rate of serious problems was very low, just 8%, which backs up what James had said when he called it “the workhorse of the 4K Blu-ray player world.”

The “problem child” that emerged from this latest survey is the Sony UBP-X700. Of the 103 Sony users, around 77.7% reported some problems over time; Recurrent and/or serious problems were 23%. The number one complaint is freezing during triple layer transitions, something that has long been discussed on Blu-ray forums.

The survey shows another interesting pattern: problems over time. For Sony, problems became more common over time, but for Panasonic the pattern was that failures appeared early, but with better long-term reliability.

The other players in the survey fell between the two extremes, but some of the best results came from “other” players, including game consoles and more specialized Blu-ray products.

Satisfaction with those products was exceptionally high, with the PS5 scoring significantly higher than the Xbox. This is even more surprising given the performance of the Sony X700 – the PS5 is a more premium product and that seems to be reflected in its reliability; Unfortunately, we shouldn’t expect more PlayStations to arrive with a disc player.

I should make it clear, as the original Redditor did, that in some cases the sample size for ownership in these surveys is quite low, so we should take the results with a pinch of salt. However, the Panasonic UB820 and Sony X700 were the best represented and are the two most popular players, so their data is arguably the most useful anyway.