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LG UP970 4K BD player a tortoise to Samsung's hare at CES?

LG'S UP970 is the company's first 4K Blu-ray player which will come a full 12 months after the competition. But what does it offer the others can't?

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.

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Ty Pendlebury

Jan. 4, 2017 8:45 a.m. PT

While several companies jostled to be the first to release a 4K Blu-ray player last year LG uncharacteristically waited a full 12 months to announce its own: the UP970. There are advantages to this approach: Firstly, there are about 100 4K discs available for purchase right now as opposed to a handful back then. Secondly, the standards involved are starting to sift themselves out so that potential buyers now know what they'll need their player to support. Namely things like HDR10 and Dolby Vision.

The LG UP970 will support Dolby Vision with an update coming a few months after its March release, and this is designed to coincide with the release of Dolby Vision titles.

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$200 at Amazon

Otherwise this is a UHD Blu-ray player with support for HDR (10) and discs with a resolution of 3,840 by 2,160 pixels.

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The player will also support 4K Netflix and YouTube 4K out of the box though the company is yet to detail if any other 4K streaming services will be enabled.

LG has yet to announce pricing for the player, but given that its main competition, the Samsung UBD-K8500 (2016) is $200 (converted to £163 or AU$277) and the Xbox One S is $249 (converted to £203 or AU$345), it shouldn't be too much more than that.

Supports HDR10 and Dolby Vision
Dual HDMI outputs
Netflix 4K and YouTube 4K
Ethernet and Wi-Fi