A New Addition

My requirements were rather slim with video performance being at the top of the list.

• Great video processing of blu-ray disks
• Great upconversion support for legacy DVD's
• HDMI 1.3a support
• Blu-ray Profile 2 support
  

The Oppo has received many great reviews and uses the Anchor Bay chip set for its video processing of both Blu-ray disks and for upconversion of legacy DVD's.  Since I have a fairly large collection of standard DVD's, the upconversion performance is important.  In my current setup, the Denon receiver is doing the upconversion from 480p to 1080p for my TV and I've noticed a few of my DVDs have pretty bad video quality with lumpiness in the blacks and poor contrast.  It's mainly a function of the poor mastering of the DVD's themselves, but the upconversion is exacerbating the situation.

The Oppo doesn't have all the bells and whistles that many of the other players out there have.  There's no Netflix streaming, no wireless Ethernet.  But to me, these weren't necessary.  I already have the Roku for Netflix and I have wired Ethernet available through the SONOS box so I can take full advantage of the BD-Live support of the Oppo.  However, the Oppo does support DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD formats, making it truly a universal player.  There's also a USB 2.0 port for playback of many other video formats.

To help justify the cost, the Oppo does comes with a high quality HDMI cable and two Blu-ray disks, one for video calibration and another for audio calibration.  Both contain content samples to view and listen to as well.  The disks are "Spears & Munsil High Definition Benchmark Blu-ray Edition" and "AIX Records Audio Calibration Disc and HD Music Sampler".

The build quality of the Oppo is solid and the packing material is excellent.  The Oppo is larger than most Blu-ray players, more in line with a typical audio component.  It weighs about 10 lbs, with a very sturdy look and feel.

There is a wide range of outputs supported including 7.1 channels of audio in case your receiver doesn't support decoding of some of the newer audio formats.  I however, chose to simply use the HDMI to connect the Oppo to my Denon 3808ci receiver and configured the Oppo for direct streaming of the data so the Denon could handle all audio decoding.

The setup menus are simple and clean, and the accompanying manual provides enough detail of the options to understand how they should be set.

One other nice touch is the remote.  It's large and backlit and has the standard power button for the toggle on/off, but in addition, just below the power button are two buttons, one for power on and one for power off.  These provide the discrete signals for each function making programming macros on my universal remote much easier.  Usually I have to search forums on the web to find the discrete codes (if they even exist) and then figure out how to get them into my remote.  To me this is just another indication that extra thought was put into the product from a users perspective and I for one appreciate it.

So how did it perform?  Well, I don't yet have much Blu-ray content to test with, but the included disks provided some previews of the new audio formats and some great high resolution scenes.  These looked and sounded great.  But the real test for me was putting in one of my standard DVD's with poor video quality.  For this, I loaded up Pan's Labyrinth which on my old Sony DVD player showed considerable issues with dark scenes.  The Oppo improved the quality but could not completely remove the issues.  It made the movie watchable without continually being distracted by the artifacts.  What this tells me is the upconversion on the Oppo is superior to the upconversion of my Denon receiver.

I did get my daughter the Blu-ray version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for Christmas and we watched it that day.  It may be the disk itself, but to me the entire movie seemed too dark, not emotionally, but visually.  It was as if scenes were shot without adequate light or the bulb in my DLP TV was half as bright as normal.  We were watching during the day and there was some ambient light from outside, but this doesn't completely account for what I was seeing.  I have a few Blu-ray disks on order (Star Trek, No Country for Old Men and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead), so I'll be able to tell if this is a general issue or just a disk issue.  It's more than likely a disk issue as I didn't see any issues with the provided sampler disks.

As of now, I'm definitely impressed with this player and to me it was worth the extra cost.  I could have bought it online from Amazon, but I decided to buy directly from the manufacturer.  It was the same cost and I didn't feel like giving Amazon a cut for not really providing any value.

My old Sony DVD player has been moved to the guest bedroom replacing the very first DVD player I bought many years ago, a Pioneer DV-414.  I think I'm going to like Blu-ray and I'll try to insure my daughter stops calling it blurry.