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Sony X800M2: 4K Blu-ray player with Dolby Vision coming for $300

Sony says its new 4K Blu-ray player, the X800M2, which supports the Dolby Vision HDR standard, is due in May.

Ty Pendlebury Editor
Ty Pendlebury is a journalism graduate of RMIT Melbourne, and has worked at CNET since 2006. He lives in New York City where he writes about streaming and home audio.
Expertise Ty has worked for radio, print, and online publications, and has been writing about home entertainment since 2004. He majored in Cinema Studies when studying at RMIT. He is an avid record collector and streaming music enthusiast. Credentials
  • Ty was nominated for Best New Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, but he has only ever won one thing. As a youth, he was awarded a free session for the photography studio at a local supermarket.
Ty Pendlebury
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Sony

With Oppo bowing out of the race in 2018, Sony is one of the only manufacturers still catering to the high end when it comes to 4K Blu-ray players . With the new X800M2, announced at CES, it also fixes something the company left out of the original X800: Dolby Vision.

While the cheaper X700 offered it (and hence earned our recommendation instead) the expected Dolby Vision update skips the X800 and comes to the new M2 instead.

Dolby Vision is one of several competing standards of High Dynamic Range (HDR) video, which aims to increase picture quality through increased colors and contrast in 4K movies.

The new X800M2 supports 4K Ultra HD playback, HDR10, Dolby Vision and Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) in addition to 4K upscaling. Like the original, the player supports Hi-Res Audio and DSD as well as SACD/DVD-A. The Sony will also include 4K streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube, though it's unclear if it also supports HDR . Unlike the X1000, the X800M2 comes with digital outputs only.

The X800M2 will be available in mid-May for $300.

Originally published on Jan 7 2019 8:15 PM

Update, April 18:  Added pricing and availability

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