nacthenud

I miss my thread talking about the best 4K UHD Blu Rays for HDR. Going to have to start that one over, at some point.  Maybe.  But I'm glad there are new boards... even if they aren't the old boards.

Both the S and X are decent blu-ray players.  Now that Microsoft has worked out most of the serious issues they had with 4k UHD HDR playback, they work well and likely won't be outperformed by a cheap standalone player.  If you want to do better, you'll have to jump up to a premium machine.  That was not the case, a few months ago, but credit where it is due for getting their crap sorted.  (For what it's worth, I've still seen some reports of people complaining about occasional stuttering and pixelation.)

The biggest problems the S and X previously had were 1) raised black levels, making blacks look grey; and 2) incorrect colours due to converting the YCbCr signal to RGB before outputting to the TV (even if you selected in the options to output YCbCr, the Xbox would first convert to RGB and then convert back to YCbCr).  Both of those problems have now been patched out.

The lack of Dolby Vision is definitely a drawback, though it is minor relative to the problems above.  HDR10 is certainly a big dramatic leap forward from no HDR.  Dolby Vision is then a small hop further.  Is it better?  Yes.  Is it dramatically better?  No.  The biggest difference Dolby Vision provides won't become dramatically apparent until we start getting TV's that display 12-bit colour and are capable of over 4,000nits of peak brightness.  

If I were buying a player today to replace my Panasonic UB900, I would go with a high-end player that supports Dolby Vision, like the sadly discontinued Oppo-203.

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