How many video streaming services do you subscribe to? And how many of those reckon they can deliver you full-on, state-of-the-art picture and sound quality for your monthly fee? The answers are likely to be “plenty” and “almost all of them.” But true home-cinema aficionados know the truth: The best picture quality and the best sound quality are only available from a physical storage format. Which is 4K UHD Blu-ray.
Streaming services have made big strides with picture and sound quality, but the difference between a movie streamed in 4K HDR and Dolby Atmos from, say, Netflix or Disney+ is night and day. If you want to truly see and hear the benefits of the latest home entertainment technologies, 4K UHD Blu-ray discs are where it’s at. Honest. And a good 4K UHD Blu-ray player will make the best of your cherished old collection of HD Blu-rays or even (whisper it) DVDs. The upscaling capabilities of the best players have to be seen to be believed—they’re more than capable of breathing new life into your old favorites.
To make your purchasing decision as easy as possible, we’ve selected the five best 4K UHD Blu-ray players around, from affordable to not remotely affordable and most points in between. They support advanced HDR formats like Dolby Vision and HDR10+ dynamic metadata—Dolby Vision remains the more common of the two should you have to choose, but some will support both. And they’ll decode spatial, object-based surround-sound audio formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, so if you’ve a compatible speaker system or soundbar, you can reap the sonic benefits too.
Check out our other TV-adjacent guides like the Best Soundbars, Best Projectors, and, of course, Best TVs.
Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com and our print magazine (if you’d like). Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day.
.mp4 "Tech Up Your Sourdough With These Upper-Crust Baking Gadgets")
