Samsung UBD-K8500 Ultra HD Blu-ray Player

SAMSUNG UBD-K8500 – DESIGN AND CONNECTIONS

On close inspection, the UBD-K8500 isn’t quite the premium proposition I expected for the money, but it’s a stylish and well-made machine. Samsung sticks with the curved design of its recent Blu-ray decks to match its curved TVs, but the jutting angles and classy brushed black finish take the deck in an even sleeker direction.
A row of four touch-sensitive controls runs along the front edge but there’s no display panel, just a small power LED that glows red or green. Lower down the front panel is a USB port covered by a clunky plastic flap, alongside the disc tray.
The rear panel is sparse but that’s hardly surprisingly when HDMI does most of the donkey work. However, the inclusion of two HDMI outputs is very welcome. It means that you can feed 4K pictures to your TV from the main output while piping audio to your AV receiver separately – essential if your receiver doesn’t support 4K signals.
The main HDMI 2.0a output supports HDR and uses HDCP 2.2 copy protection. Joining the HDMIs are optical digital output and an Ethernet port, which you can use instead of the built-in Wi-Fi to access the deck’s online goodies (more on that later). And Samsung has a message for those expecting analogue audio connections: get with the times, granddad.

SAMSUNG UBD-K8500 – FEATURES

Ultra HD Blu-ray playback is the star attraction, but the UBD-K8500 is crammed full of other features. For starters you can play all of your existing Blu-ray discs and DVDs (with 4K upscaling) and although 3D isn’t part of the UHD Blu-ray spec you can play 3D Blu-rays too. It spins CDs, but not SACD or DVD-Audio.
The deck also plays content from USB drives connected to the front port, including any 4K video files you have in your collection. MKV, DivX, AVCHD, WMV and JPEG are all supported.
The deck offers a wide range of online apps including Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, both of which offer 4K streaming (but not HDR support). Their inclusion is welcome, but they might end up being redundant if they’re built into your 4K TV already.
Also on board are Spotify, Deezer, All4 and loads more in the Samsung Apps section, but oddly there’s no BBC iPlayer or ITV Hub – these will be added with a software update.
You can stream music, video and photo files from PCs and NAS drives on your home network and use screen mirroring to view a smartphone on your TV. The deck also offers 7.1-channel Dolby True HD and DTS HD Master Audio decoding and bitstream output via HDMI.


SAMSUNG UBD-K8500 – SETUP & OPERATION

The UBD-K8500 sticks with the same bright and breezy menu system as its regular Blu-ray players, which is a good thing. The Home screen uses three large panels – Play Disc, Multimedia and Samsung Apps – with selected apps and other options running along the bottom.
It’s all very colourful and welcoming, ideal for AV virgins and veterans alike. The deck delves into NAS drives with no messing about and navigates through labyrinthine folder structures quickly and smoothly. Videos and songs load instantly, while the use of cover art and bright graphics make it a gratifying process.
The setup menu features a thorough range of settings – including an HDMI Colour Format option – while the grid-style Samsung Apps screen makes it easy to find and install the software you want.
I whipped out the stopwatch and timed how long the deck took to load UHD Blu-ray platters – nineteen seconds on average. Not the week-long wait of the first Blu-ray decks, then. As for Blu-ray, it started playing the stubborn Terminator Salvation disc in a mere 20 seconds.
The UBD-K8500’s remote is compact and slender with pared-down buttonry. It looks like the Smart Control remote that comes with Samsung’s latest TVs. The zapper sits nicely in the hand and the layout is generally intuitive, but there’s one big flaw – to scan through a disc you have to hold down the chapter skip keys. The longer you hold it, the faster it goes.

SAMSUNG UBD-K8500 – PERFORMANCE

With the UBD-K8500 connected to Samsung’s HDR-capable UE55KS9000T TV, I ripped the cellophane from Life of Pi and The Martian and settled in for some 4K action.
And sure enough, the UBD-K8500 delivers eye-popping images, with intense detail and an overall sense of three-dimensionality that common-or-garden Blu-ray simply can’t deliver – provided your TV’s good enough to make the most of it, that is.
Take a look at the sea of meerkats that Pi discovers on the carnivorous island – the clarity and punch of the scene is stunning. Every meerkat in the shot is clearly defined, right down to their little black eyes and tufts of hair. As the swarms ripple and stand to attention, the deck resolves the patterned movement with a steady, focused hand.
Elsewhere the disc is packed with luxurious images that showcase the benefits of UHD Blu-ray. Shots of the island reveal individual leaves on trees, crisp ripples in the water and the grainy texture of moss covering the floor. Richard Parker’s CG fur and the scuffed wooden interior of the boat are with pin-sharp clarity.
But before I get too carried away, Ultra HD Blu-ray’s picture quality isn’t quite the revelatory experience you might expect in terms of resolution. Sure, pictures look cleaner and sharper than Blu-ray, but it’s not the epiphany I felt when moving from DVD to Blu-ray.
Part of the problem is that most of the first Ultra HD Blu-ray discs have been upscaled to 4K from 2K masters – as is the case with the discs I’m using here. Most of Sony’s first discs, including Chappie and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, have been created from a 4K digital intermediate and are more likely to show off the format to its full potential. But the bottom line is that picture quality varies from disc-to-disc.
But resolution isn’t the story here anyway. The real advantages of Ultra HD Blu-ray are High Dynamic Range and the extended colour gamut. On a good quality HDR TV, the Samsung delivers a punchy, expansive image that really pops from the screen. Blacks are profoundly deep and inky while small dots of light are bright and piercing.
For example, as Pi gazes up at the night sky from the boat, the brighter stars are strong, concentrated dots of light shooting through the dense black sky with no bleed to sully their clarity. It conveys the differing levels of brightness among the other stars too. Look down at the sea and the crisp, candescent glow of the jellyfish surrounding the boat is utterly hypnotic.
Similar highlights can be seen in The Martian, such as the spinning light beacon at the start of chapter four, which punches through the Martian darkness. But it’s not only dark scenes that benefit – brightly lit shots of Matt Damon moving equipment around look dense and textured.

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