Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First off, if you have an Xbox One, and don't have a 4K TV don't upgrade. Secondly, if you have a 4K TV, and don't have a UHD BluRay Player, OR a TV that has Netflix with 4K built in, this is a spectacular buy. On to the review. This is an Xbox One. It does all the Xbox One things that all the other Xbox One's do, but it doesn't come with a Kinect, and it comes with a new controller that is not the Elite Controller, but is better than the stock controller from the previous version. Gone is the power brick so this takes up a lot less space. You could reasonably mount this in your car under the seat. (I did this with the 360). I wouldn't, but you could because it is smaller, and doesn't have that annoying brick. It is quieter. Not by much but some. It has a 2TB hard drive so you don't need an external drive if you want to have like 40 games installed. Soon there will be smaller sizes of drive, but the 2TB is nice. (See the comments I talk about actually testing this) It's white, and that doesn't go with my home theater, or likely yours. It also shows the dust more, but fingerprints less. I'll post pictures and such, in addition to the "what's in the box" video later, but the long and the short of it is that the reason for this as an upgrade is you want to watch movies in 4k. Games too. And HDR does make some of the games better. It makes some of them worse. But most of them better. There is not supposed to be any CPU / GPU gains in this version, but there are. Hawken that crawls sometimes plays smooth on this. Play back on Hulu is not any better from a bitstream standpoint, unlike NetFlix which has 4K, but Hulu "tears" less. This is when you see a line about half to a third of the way up where part of the frame is ahead of the rest of the image. Not noticeable on small screens, but on my projector it is, and this doesn't have it any more so things look better. HDR is supported at 1080p so if you have a HDR 1080p Display, (like a really good computer monitor) you can get some benefit without a 4k display. Finally if you are debating between this and the $250 Xbox One and you don't have a 4k. Get the cheaper one and the Elite Controller, or 3 games, you will be happier. If you are thinking of buying a UHD BluRay player, buy this instead, it is a better player than the one or two on the market right now, and Microsoft will keep the software up to date. There are some comments about Dolby Atmos. It will pass bitstream Atmos to your receiver it will not upconvert, or side convert to Atmos. You wouldn't want this anyway it is better to take the audio that the sound guy mixed for 5.1 or 7.1 and use that then it is to fold 7.1.4 down using an algorithm. Hints: You may want a USB Stick for moving your games and such. I found that while cloud storage works, for things like my Forza replays it was going to take days to move. A 128 Gig USB stick made short work of this. You can also use a USB Hard Disk. The Controller is Bluetooth in addition to the proprietary Xbox wireless protocol. This is cool because you can pair it with your laptop if it had bluetooth, or your Android device. I don't have one to try, but I believe this means that it would work with some of the inexpensive Android Game Consoles. On my Laptop it worked flawlessly. The vertical stand seems like a good idea. The temp of the air coming off of the Xbox is pretty warm, and it is a good sized opening I worry that on a dark shelf it would fill with dust and burn up. This is not substantiated, only an inference. If you are upgrading get the Kinect connector for free. xbox.com/XboxOne/KinectAdapter you have to register both Xbox, and even if you don't use the Kinect much you don't want to wish you were going to have a Dance Party and not have it. That's all for now, will do more update after I have had more time to play with it. Comments regarding HDMI, Dolby Vision, HDR10, and 12bit: (If you don't know what this is you won't miss it, and if you do you still won't miss it.) Xbox doesn't support Dolby Vision. This is not likely an issue for a number of reasons that follow. If DolbyVision does become the dominant way of encoding for HDMI Microsoft could ad it since Dolby Vision doesn't require any additional hardware. The HDMI Signal Path is the same but a header is added that specifies the range for the given content. In theory this allows for 10bits of color but allows for a custom curve for the color, and for the Min-Max-Median values to be set differently. The Xbox supports 12 bit color at 4k, and that allows for 10bit plus the gamut adjustment found in Dolby Vision. But enabling this requires a license. Because Xbox supports 12 bit, a movie is encoded for DolbyVision, unless you have an extremely high end system the decode should allow playback with no loss of clarity if your TV supports 12bit. I don't know of a TV that supports Dolby vision that doesn't support 12bit, and many 1080p systems support 12bit but don't recognize the "HDR" flag, but will give HDR results if they are better than the standard and return the proper HDMI handshakes for describing their capabilities. To enable this you may need to Force the Xbox to HDMI PC Mode rather than TV and Autodetect. This is generally a good thing to do unless you move your Xbox a lot as it also enables you to set 24hz, and a few other options which are often not always available. Things that make me sad: Xbox Video Market doesn't include 4k Version of Movies. It would be nice if I could Rent/Buy 4K on demand. I don't use Kinect much, but I notice that I miss voice controls for movies. I wish they had included a mic so that it did the "Alexa thing". (which is surprising because I'm paranoid about things listening)