Blu-ray Players, Blankets, and Nest Temperature Sensors: New This Week

Back in April, we learned that Oppo Digital would stop manufacturing its entire line of audio-video products, many of which we had come to love. And because we loved them so much, we decided to continue recommending Oppo models as long as we could still find them—although the company wasn’t making any new products, it told us it was still committed to honoring warranties and firmware updates for at least a few more years.

But it’s been a few months, and Oppo’s Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray players are now completely out of stock at every online retailer, which means they’re gone for good.

It’s okay. We’re sad, too.

Although Sony’s Blu-ray players are our current picks for most people, we’d like to have a new recommendation for videophiles with complex home theater setups. Fortunately, three new UltraHD Blu-ray players coming from Panasonic look like they might fill the holes Oppo left behind, and the UB820 in particular has the potential to replace our previous upgrade pick from Oppo, the late UDP-203. The UB820 promises precise chroma scaling to upconvert standard HD videos, with full support for all HDR formats including HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. And when it finally becomes available, it’s expected to cost around $500, less than the UDP-203 was when Oppo discontinued it. The UB820 is scheduled to be available at the end of July, and we’re looking forward to getting our hands (and eyes) on it to see how it holds up.

We had to retire several of our other non-4K Blu-ray picks this week as well, including our former budget pick, the Sony BDP-S1500, which was discontinued and replaced with the BDP-S1700. Although we haven’t had a chance to test the new version yet, we know that it has the same streaming capabilities and still lacks Wi-Fi, so it’s similar enough that we can still recommend it with confidence.

Here are some other things we updated this week:

Blankets: Our lightweight summer blanket pick, the Target Threshold Gauze Bed Blanket, has been discontinued, so we’ve replaced it with The Company Store’s Gossamer Blanket. We've also removed the discontinued Cuddledown Edina Washable Wool Blanket.

Smart Thermostats: After living with the new Nest Temperature Sensors, we’ve put together some testing notes and added them to this guide.

Headphones Under $100: We’ve added a new Care and maintenance section to this guide, with tips to help you get the most use out of your headphones.

Qi Wireless Chargers: We finished testing a number of new wireless chargers, but none of them lived up to our current picks. We’ve added these dismissals to the Competition section.