LG UBK80 4K Ultra-HD Blu-ray Player with HDR Compatibility (2018)

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Plays 4K movies flawlessly. I dont need it to play music, giving it one star because you didnt do your research isnt a good reason to give the product a poor review. It will, actually, play almost anything... Just not to the standards of the other reviewer apparently ;).

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Seems excellent in performance with one fatal flaw that it does not show elapsed or remaining time onscreen when pausing or fast forwarding. In order to view time info you need to press the "info" button which shows a popup display. This is awkward at best and in a particularly brain dead approach the info display disappears shortly after pushing the button. So to advance to a particular time you have to keep pushing this dumb button. Also the remote is a piece of junk but fortunately I replaced it with a universal remote. I expect more from LG. Incidentally I contacted their customer service since I have never experienced lack of onscreen time during pause for any video device I ever owned aönd they confirmed that it cannot be displayed automatically during pause.

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My home theater (my living room when not used for other purposes) consists of an HD projector (projecting the image on a large pull-down screen from the ceiling), driven by a Panasonic (nearly 11 years old?) Blu-Ray player, with audio being only 2-channel/stereo through a normal home stereo system. But something started to fail in my old Panasonic player, so it was time to buy something new. I wanted something good quality, and did not want to cheap out on it, but neither did I want to pay for a bunch of features that I dont need or plan to use. Seems that Panasonic players these days are all quite expensive, so maybe they have decided to target the higher end market. I thought of Sony, but reviews of their current products made it seem that that companys quality is not what it used to be. Samsung makes good stuff, but I was not impressed by their offerings in this area. I considered Philips, but their styling put me off. I refused to consider any maker who name I did not recognize or have experience with. What I was most impressed with was the current LG lineup; consistently high reviews, and I keep coming back to LG for my major home appliances, as well as my most recent smart phone. So I decided to buy my new machine from LG, but they had several models....I picked this model UBK80 "4k Ultra-HD Blu-Ray/DVD player" because it did not have unwanted features (such as video streaming support), but neither was it the lowest end model, and the price seemed reasonable for a middlin product from a higher end maker. This machine seems to be very solidly made, and this is consistent with everything else I have by this manufacturer. It is also a minimalist design, having only four buttons on the front, and no display. The buttons are Open/Close, Play/Pause, Stop, Power On/Off/Standby. There is also a power/status LED on the front. Besides those things, the only other features on the front are the disk tray and a USB socket. On the rear, there are only three things, a LAN/Ethernet port, an HDMI output port, and an Optical Audio Output (fiber optic). *******This unit does NOT have any traditional analog audio outputs, and it also does not have any kind of analog video output, such as composite video, or S-Video. The audio part was a surprise to me, and I wondered how I was going to get analog stereo outputs to feed into my stereo amplifier. My solution was to purchase one of the many adapters that are designed to address this kind of situation. I selected the SYNiC brand, model ESY069 "192kHz DAC" adapter, which is quite inexpensive yet seems to be well designed and built. The ESY069 comes with a power supply (many competing products that cost a bit less do NOT come with the power supply), and it also comes with the fiber optic cable to connect between the Blu-Ray player and this adapter. The adapter can also accept wired digital input, and its outputs consist of a pair of stereo analog outputs on RCA jacks, plus an 1/8" stereo headphone jack with associated volume control knob. I mention all of this because I suppose that many other buyers might not realize that in order to use the player with an older audio system, that they will need to buy something extra to make it work. The audio output can either operate as an automatic format (LPCM, Dolby Digital, DTS, etc), or you can select it to PCM mode, which only supports 2-channel/stereo. I had to select the PCM mode in order to get my audio adapter to work. The player can handle a lot of different formats. In the Blu-Ray world, it can accept regular Blu-Ray, as well as Ultra HD Blu-Ray and 3D Blu-Ray disks. In the DVD world, is accepts regular DVD, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD-RW(VR). It accepts regular audio CDs and CD-R/RW. For Blu-Ray and DVD, it can deal with movies, music, and photos. The player comes with a rather small infra-red remote control; it is about half the size of most other remote controls I have. Still, it has all the necessary buttons and features. It uses a single AAA battery, which is included. I need to mention that this player does not come with any cables, other that the power cord. You must already have a suitable HDMI cable, and a fiber optic cable for the audio (as I mentioned above, the audio adapter I bought came with the fiber optic cable, and I already had an HDMI cable from my older player). So far, I have watched a few movies, both DVD and regular Blu-Ray, and it has worked as expected. I am very impressed with the speed with which this player gets down to business when a disk is loaded into the tray. I am used to waiting for 20 - 30 seconds, sometimes more, for my older player to futz around before I can start playing a disk. With this player, it only takes a few seconds. I am very happy with this product so far.

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Already have a smart tv and just need a quality player for your movies and dont need all the hastles that come with another "smart" device? This is the blu ray player for you! Anyway i have had sony (not to bad) and samsung (horrible) blu ray players they are all smart and it just causes problems with updates and poor firmware and whatnot. My kids and wife have the player running almost constantly and since things got smart i havent found anything that lasted more then like 9 months. I never plugged in the ethernet cord and this thing just plays moves without any hastle at all, no menus or screens to go through to pick dvd they just auto play like god intended. I mean really who relies on their dvd player as a smart device anyway. Ordering 2 more of the stoopid players soon for the bedrooms

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Excellent playback of 4K HDR content. Excellent sound via optical cable (I used Dolby function thru it and loved it). But I am disappointed in the price point for a wired-only bluray player. I didnt pay attention to if it had WiFi when purchasing it, but it still gets the job done and there wasnt any issues with picture and audio quality. It would have been better to have waited to get one after Dolby Vision rolled out to a lot of devices too so my review for this item is luke warm on other features that I know I missed out on from many other products. (and the picture shows the only connections offered on this device so be sure you have an HDMI cable.)

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I finally replaced my hated Sony Blu-Ray player with this 4K LG model. Everything about this player is better: responsiveness, no bugs/problems yet, better UI, better "smart" features, etc. 4K DVD selection is still not very good, but its much better than it was a year ago. The picture vs. regular BluRay is not great - not like the difference between SD and even 720p, which was such a noticeable improvement. But since this is backwards compatible, BluRay and regular DVDs play in it and look good too. After originally having a sluggish Samsung DVD player, then a bad Sony Blu-Ray player, its a blessing to not have a single complaint about a player like this. It just works like it should.

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Best 4K UHD Disc Player for the price. No freezing or other issues seen by other players in this price range. Would highly recommend to others looking for an entry level player.

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This inexpensive Blu-ray player does a great job of playing 4K videos. I really like it.

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This is a piece of junk. Dont waste your money. Wont connect to my home network. LG DVD player being paired with an LG tv and I still cannot get it to work. Tried wireless and wired connection. Support for set up is a video tutorial that races through and has no sound. What a joke. Thought LG was of some decent quality, but I guess I was wrong.Says just connect the HDMI cable and you are good to go. What a load of bull... Review continued. Gave up trying to connect the device to the network as prompted in set-up and just put a disc into it and hit movie, and guess what...it played...If it isnt necessary to connect to a network then why the continued prompt to do do. A more helpful prompt would have been..."we dont know why we are prompting you to connect to a network, when it isnt necessary, were just stupid that way...why dont you just put a disk in the player and hit play..." My one star still stands for all the time I wasted trying to connect to a network. Will never buy an LG product again...

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Performs well but I am disappointed that it doesnt have a visual display of where you are in the video

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