Customer Ratings & Reviews

This player is excellent. I have it hooked up to a Sony 4k 850C model and the picture is amazing. Ive watched several movies on it and the picture is stunning. I also liked that it allowed my sony remote to control the basic functions. I had it several months and it started to malfunction. It wouldn't stay on for 5 min and then it would freeze up and stop working. I contacted Samsung and they had me ship it back to them. My unit was fixed quickly and shipped back to me in a few days. Samsungs customer service was excellent. I was so happy they was able to fix my 4k player and now im back to watching my movies. I would definitely recommend this 4k player to anyone. Definitely worth the money.

I am so happy that I purchased this unit. The price will certainly come down, but I had to buy an entire new system. No point getting a 4k tv without a 4k blu ray player. I can definitely tell the difference between 4k and 1080p. Some great YouTube 4k videos and some movies. Not a lot of content now, but the amount will grow. Keep in mind that the unit is not worth it unless you have a 4k tv.

Finally 4k player is priced reasonably. Do not have any 4k movies but playing blu ray movies with the upscaling adds so much more pop that it is worth the investment. Cannot wait until they bring make the 4k the standard so pricing of movies are reasonable in price.

Not worth it. Can't play DVDs from other countries.

Plastic case is very light weight and flimsy. Using the remote to input information such as programs/passwords etc. is hard using the remote's keys which are small and letters /numbers are easily mis-entered. Frustrating and time consuming. For the retail price of $399. it is greatly overpriced. Even at Half price it stills feels very cheaply manufactured. I received a later price match which made the 8500 model palatable at under $140. I purchased the Samsung because the BB Salesperson told me that the Samsung 8500 was the only device currently available that had the capability to show Ultra Movies. Sadly, Roku is only a streaming device as I had hoped to upgrade to a more advanced Roku Brand or LG model if one was available that also showed Ultra Movies. I'm sure there will be quality devices perhaps made by LG to match up with their OLED TVS available in 2017. Samsung owned that particular market in 2016! Despite the above opinions the Picture Quality is great! This Ultra capability is the only reason I am recommending.

This is a great 'do it all' conduit to 4K content for those with 4K setups that lack smart apps. My personal tv had smart app access so personally I prefer that route over using the player but if I didn't, I would definitely go this route for 4K access. You get the 4K content providers like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon and then of course get uhd disc capabilities. I've pleasantly surprised at the speed of the interface, especially when loading uhd discs. I was replacing an older generation blu ray player and that older device absolutely chugged thru disc load ups. This feels quite fast. Your mileage on the quality of the pic is obviously going to vary depending on if your set is HDR capable. There is a small difference in vibrancy from blu Ray to 4K but adding the bells and whistles of a HDR setup really gives you a picture that pops. Also keep in mind, the overwhelming amount of uhd discs out there were movies that were not even recorded in 4K so just about all of us are watching up scaled movies anyway.

Since this player came out I have been waiting for a restock to try out. Lot of positive reviews and people talking about the picture quality. I have several UHD movies which include BD copy as well. I'm using a Samsung UN55JS8500 TV which is 4:4:4, HDR, and have the player hooked up to an HDCP 2.2 compatible Denon AVR-X4200W. I wanted to test the picture quality to compare with my PS4 which I use currently as a BD player. I hooked up both systems using the Denon as my hdmi switcher. Cables connecting both players were identical high speed 2.2 compliant HDMI cables. I played a full scene of The Martian on UHD, then swapped to the same scene on BD. I repeated this test with Mad Max as well as Sicario, each time choosing several scenes for each movie to get a wide range of comparison images. I was left questioning why anyone would spend $400 for this upgrade. The HDR colors did seem more vibrant, however, it was akin to having the TV set to "Dynamic" instead of "Movie" modes. Sitting within 10 ft. of the screen and I was unable to see a difference in resolution. I actually preferred seeing the detail with the BD non-HDR version better! I realize most of these films are 2k remastered in 4K, and true 4K content is few and far between... However, this isn't worth $400 for me. I would rather upgrade another component before getting this. While testing I had no handshake issues with the 4K player, it performed well, and once setup appropriately it delivered uncompressed Dolby Atmos or DTS-HD Master Audio to my receiver. The remote is tiny, like the original iPod mini. I will wait for these to come down in price before upgrading my setup. If you don't have a quality Blu Ray player now, I may suggest this for you... But even then it's hard to turn your cheek to a quality BD player that is a quarter of the price.

I also purchased the Samsung UN65JS8500 4K TV at the same time. Playing back a 4K Blu-ray movie (The Revenant) almost looked 3D without 3D. The resolution seams to gives a lot of depth to the image. The video is truly impressive. The 3D is also pretty impressive. I doubt I will use it much but since it has the capability I at least wanted to try it. I bought “Despicable Me” in 3D and it looked fantastic. Now for the bad, there were two things. First, the price, it is expensive but you know that when you decide to buy it so to hold that against it isn’t very helpful for a review. Second, there was an issue with play back on the 4K movie. When I first played the movie I only watched a short part of it and everything was fine. I then switched movies to check out a 3D movie and everything was fine. When I went back to the 4K movie it recognized I had stated to watch it and asked if I would like to resume from where I had left off. I answered YES and when it started to play the audio and video were way out of sync. I stopped it then started to play it from the beginning and everything was in sync. I was able to skip ahead to where I was and everything stayed in sync. A small annoyance and I am sure something they can fix with a software update.

Our household has the Samsung trio of curves--the 55" UN559000FXZA UltraHD Smart 3D TV, soundbar HW-J7500/ZA and now the 3D wifi built-in blu Ray Disc player UBD-K8500. So with this grouping, the curves work and look good together. I connected the player myself and had no difficulty. I read all the reviews and asked questions at the Best Buy store before my online Best Buy order player arrived. That helped immensely. The other thing is I was not itching to get all into this high def but my sports enthusiast husband thought it looked great. I could have stayed with the old set but it expired after 15 years. Now I am hooked! And while the remote is small--it is about the same size as the other Samsung device remotes, it is easier for me to operate and figure out than my IPhone was! Do like this Samsung blu ray disc player and tested out a 15 minutes of The Martian, Netflix and wow! So even if you are AARP eligible, you can embrace this now, too.

This is the only 4k player on the market today. It's more on the expensive side. I could not believe that it took the industry so long to come out with a 4k player. The 4k TVs were on sale for quite some time, and there were no software and player to go with it. The player felt a bit cheap and light like any $50 Blu-ray player and the design could use a few enhancements. I wish there is a LED panel on the player to give you the stats of the movie. As for the remote, it's probably one of the worse designed remote on the market. It's small and with very few buttons. It's not very intuitive. To change the playback settings you have to go through a series of on-screen options. The old remote had CC, Subtitles, sound, etc. options right on the remote and it was very easy to operate. You need a lot of patience with this little remote. The curved design of the player is not much to desire for, I would have been happy with just a rectangular casing. I would not recommend this player to anyone, but since this is the only 4K player on the market, you don't have any choice, and nothing to compare it to. So, if you have a 4K TV, yes, I reluctantly recommend this player.

So this was actually a really nice player but a little slow with the GUI. I streamed 4k netflix and watched a bluray. Everything seemed fine until hooking up to 4k projector (HDCP enabled). Got a bit of jutter and white lines throughout screen. I'm guessing the unit was defective but I think I'm going to hold off on replacing for the time being. Hopefully prices will drop soon as more models become available.

I bought this player thinking I was going to be blown away at the diffrences from a 4k stream to a 4k uhd disc and sadly I was not! Was the picture flawless yes as it was with my downloaded 4k movies from m-go/vidity , Sorry folks but I still don't see why anyone would choose to go physical discs over streaming or downloaded. Really the only downside is with streams your not getting the dolby true hd or dts hd tracks Yet. I specify yet because I'm sure its coming. And the vudu app on the Samsung doesn't even offer 4k material either ...another kick in the teeth for the 400.00 price tag! Stick to the digital media folks cause I don't see physical discs taking off at all. 4k is here to stay no question but video stores/rentals are all dead and gone! The player itself didn't disappoint , It did everything it was supposed to and did it fast! But if your buying this thing thinking your gonna be blown away compared to some you tube streams or amazon 4k movies you have tried then your gonna be upset cause its not gonna blow you away like you may have heard. And I am displaying my movies on js9500 tv with hdr and it looks great but I can honestly say its no better than my movies ive bought off mgo and downloaded to my vidity enabled media storage device. If vudu offered 4k on the player I would for sure keep it but since its not this thing is on its way back to bestbuy tomorrow for full refund.

Ok, I bought a 65" Samsung 8500 SUHD tv last November and love it. Especially watching blu-rays since regular tv doesn't benefit from the 4k yet. I also bought a Samsung 6500 up-scaling Blu-ray player for about $100 and it really brought new life to my blu-ray collection. I've been researching this 8500 4k player for a while now and have been drooling over getting one since it was released in March but I hadn't pulled the trigger until last week when I decided to buy it and 3 movies in 4K including The Martian, Mad Max Fury Road and San Andreas. I spent a little time last night making sure I had the best connections using my ONKYO receiver. I did like the feature this player has with a split HDMI output. One for video and one for audio so I was able to send the video directly to my tv and take advantage of the BD WISE feature that I couldn't use before. It really set all of the settings to make a great picture BUT it wasn't any better then my $100 upscaling player. I tried very very hard to make it better to justify keeping it and my 3 movies but after watching The Martian and comparing the 4K to the up-scaled Blu-ray I could not tell any difference at all and trust me, I tried. In fact some scenes were not as clear on this player compared to the up-scaling one. One scene at the beginning when the storm is coming over the mountain it was juttery. And several times the person seemed to have what we called back in the day as snow (dots) on them. So, sadly, I have packed this one back up and planned to return it tomorrow to Best-buy. I'm very disappointed. Yesterday when this arrived I was like a kid at Christmas. I purchased the 3 movies from Amazon and they gratefully made an exception for me to return the movies, including The Martian that I had already opened. So as far as would I recommend this player to a friend? ONLY if they didn't own an up-scaling player already and just had $400 to blow. but honestly, the $100 4K up-scaling player looks just as good to me as this one and the remote control is much nicer too so I'd buy it and let the prices drop on the 4K players and DVDs. Plus, let them work out any kinks with the players. I knew better then to buy a first edition.

I heard that Ultra 4K players were in the process of being released... Never knew they were until I recently saw and bought the Dead pool Ultra 4K disc and researched the players again and saw that this Samsung Ultra 4Kplayer was already released... I am a Samsung buyer for years so I know they normally have good stuff... This player is good, but I am however disappointed in the design and the sub-par remote control unit... For one of the latest 4K format player out there, it's really sad... I have two other Samsung playing in my home including a Samsung BD-F7500 player which looks a lot better aesthetics wise than the K8500... Picture is good, sound is good... Price is too much for the cheap looks of the player but a lot better than the competition, so definitely worth getting if on a budget...

Got this new UHD blu ray player when they first started appearing in February 2016. Used it to watch standard blu rays until UHD blu ray discs came out. Now I own sixteen UHD blus and they blow away the standard blu rays with the added HDR for brilliance in color and depth. I have owned many standard blu ray players and this one is the best because it brings a whole new dimension in watching movies. Sheer brilliance! The player upconverts standard blu ray and 3D blu rays to near 4K and it blows away the other standard upconverting players. This is a great first entry player and a great price (remembering my first blu ray player was well over $1000) and will tie me over until the other companies start putting out higher end players. Love this player and all it has to offer. Watching 4K UHD blu rays gives you another reason to get addicted to TV again!

I do not recall a better 1st Generation product that I have purchased in the past. This machine is solidly built and works. BD movies load lightening fast. The upscaler in this machine is top notch. It really does elevate watching BD movies to a new level. Top notch in this regard. It does a much better job at upscaling than my TV, so I let it do the work. So far I have watched The Martian on UHD BD. It looked good, really good. My TV is not HDR compliant, however it looked just beautiful. UHD BD movies should improve in Picture Quality over time once they are transferred from an actual 4K source. I am looking forward to the future with UHD BD. I just hope this catches on and is not a fad. I really can tell a difference over regular BD movies. This player is the "real deal".

I originally purchased this product last year when it was $400 and promptly returned it thinking it wasn't worth the price. I recently purchased an open box deal for $175 and played with it for a few weeks. It's a decent player, clearly better than the XBox 1s, but that difference in picture quality isn't major and not worth purchasing a dedicated player for. I would say it provides a 10% bump in quality and deeper blacks than the XB1s. I only have 4 hdmi ports which are all being used, so swapping between my Apple TV and UHD Player is kind of annoying. The real issue for me is the remote and just how truly awful it is. The fact that its very small isn't the issue, it's the button layout is really squeezed in and makes it very difficult to navigate. I'm someone who likes to ff and rw a lot when I watch a movie. That is nearly impossible to do with this remote and the way the general software works. I like being able to simply hold a button to get to the scene I want. On this you hold the button for a few seconds then the rw/ff option goes away and I kept constantly missing the spot I was trying to go to. A lot of times while trying to get to the exact spot I wanted I would accidentally hit the wrong button and it'll take me all the way back to the home screen and I'll have to relaunch the disc. It drove me absolutely crazy. As much as I hate the Xbox One media remote at least that remote glows in the dark and while small, the buttons are spaced out so there's very little chance of accidentally hitting the wrong button. The onscreen navigation functionality on the XB1S is just as irritating as the Samsung player. I don't understand why I can't find a player that allows for the remote to actually, control the device! Without activating some awful onscreen navigation system. The other problem with this, is the HDR format isn't as settled as I thought. There will be players released later this year that support Dolby Vision, as well as several studios signed on and there still hasn't been any real sales on UHD Movies. I'm not investing heavily in UHD Blu-rays only to find out Dolby Vision HDR versions of those same movies will be released next year. No, that's not happening. So until the HDR situation is settled, new players are released that support Dolby Vision and the players AND UHDs become reasonably priced. I'm bowing out of this mess. This from someone who has an 4k OLED. Of the current players on the market it's the best one available right now. Sure you can get an Oppo but apparently people are having issues or a Panasonic. But both those players are over $500. I haven't seen them, but really how much better can the picture quality be over the Samsung? This is only worthwhile if you can get it on sale AND you plan on going all in on UHD Blu-rays. If not there's no point in getting a UHD Player right now. I would recommend waiting until the end of the year when there are more options.

When it comes to audio-video equipment, I typically buy Sony everything, and when I don’t, I typically find myself somewhere between disappointed and very disappointed. I have (2) Sony BDP-S6200's that do a great job upscaling 1080p BDs to 4k on my 85" and 49" Sony XBR UHD TVs. I was disappointed when I discovered BDP-S6200's would only upscale to 4k and not actually read 4k UHD BDs. I immediately drove to my local Best Buy to fix the situation where I was further disappointed to find out that Sony does not yet make a 4k UHD BD player. So I purchased the Samsung UBD-K8500 on sale for a great price. THE REMOTE IS THE WORST EVER (but you'll get used to it - maybe): When I saw the remote while unpacking, I thought it was way too small, but the first real frustration came from trying to install the single CR2032 lithium disc battery (battery included) – I had to use a small jeweler’s screw driver (not included) to remove the round, plastic, rotate-and-lock/unlock battery retainer. It opens easily with a coin (also not included) when there’s already a battery installed, but not so much otherwise. Getting the retainer back on can also be a bit tricky – again, a coin helps. The real frustration with the remote came when actually trying to use it. The buttons are too small and too few functions as compared to my Sony remotes. You basically have to go into 1 of 2 pop-up menus and navigate through them to do some basic things like “rewind”, FF, change the audio track or turn subtitling on/off. DISC READING ISSUES: I don’t know if some of the following relates to 4k BD/disc-manufacturing issues or not, but I’ve convinced myself that there are some disc reading issues with the UBD-K8500. The player couldn’t read the first 4k BD (‘Good Fellas’) that I tried to play and made a lot of noise while attempting to do so. Later, I got a replacement BD from Amazon and it did the same thing except on 1 of 4 or 5 attempts I saw a picture flash on the screen and then it reported that the BD “does not meet specifications” as opposed to “unable to read”. Meanwhile, the UBD-K8500 played “Sully”, “Criminal”, “Risen” and “Martian” fine except one of these BDs also failed to play the very first time with the player indicating the BD “does not meet specifications”. So, I also returned the replacement ‘Good Fellas’ BD, thinking there’s a disc manufacturing issue. Three weeks has now passed and I just got (3) new 4k BDs and just checked them out to see if they’d play: “Accountant” and “Magnificent Seven” each played just fine on the first and only attempt. Then, when I put “Deepwater Horizon” in, I put the standard 1080p version in first by mistake, which didn’t play the first time, “couldn’t read”, but did play the second time. When I realized it was the wrong BD, I put the 4k BD in and I attempted to play it 5 times and each time the player indicated the BD “does not meet specifications” and then auto-ejected the BD. I’d about given up when I decided to power the player off with the 4k BD in the tray, turned it back on after 10 seconds and guess what: it auto-played just fine. I kept trying various things to get it to fail again, including playing the 1080p version again, but it never failed after another 5 or 6 restarts. Sounds like a firmware issue to me – and I’ve got 40+ years of firmware experience. THE PICTURE IS AMAZING: When the 4k UHD discs do play, the picture is quite amazing on my 85” Sony XBR TV – even critiquing it up close from about 2 feet. AUDIO-VIDEO SYNC ISSUES: Another issue occurs when I rewind to replay something: The audio often gets out of sync with the video – not just a little bit, but SEVERAL SECONDS out of sync - it seemed like 2 or 3 seconds – much more than I’ve ever seen before. Pause-Play (as you might think), along with other various attempts, does not fix the problem. The only thing that seems to work is cycling the power on the player – very frustrating and, depending on the disc, can be time consuming. PICTURE LOCK-UP: I read some of the reviews and noted that there were some complaints about the picture locking up while in play-mode. I had not experienced this until today. On a whim I decided to hit the pause/play button on the remote and it started up again. SUMMARY: If a Sony player had been available, it would have been my first choice, but it wasn’t and, since I got a great price, I’m not sorry I bought the Samsung. It has a great picture output and, hopefully, most these issues, except the remote, can be corrected in firmware. However, I think they could do a lot better job testing these technically complex products and correcting significant firmware and/or silicon issues before going to market.

4K content looks phenomenal on my 60" screen! Setup is a breeze. Easily added into my home theater. Only downside is the remote...kinda tiny. Maybe it's my hands but it is awkward being so small. Otherwise this is a great player!

Love the UBD-K8500 so much from Best Buy I purchased my second one yesterday, on sale for $199.99 was a steal !!! Be sure to invest in an quality 4k high speed cable like Audioquest, Monster etc. to get the best picture of your player & receiver along with audio return channel for your surround sound & or Soundbar !!! Get your 4ks, Blu-Rays & 3D's if your receiver is 2015 & Get ready to have "Your Socks blown off " !!! I have two Samsung 4K tv's & gave my dad one too !!!