Oppo OPDV97IH Review

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http://www.oppodigital.com/opdv971h.html

So, your first question should be WHY do I want to spend $200 on an old school DVD player when the HD DVD players are already out?!?

Good question... because you already have a DVD collection, you might as well get the most out of it that you can if you have an HD set. I've only watched one movie so far, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and I must say I was impressed.

I've had the Samsung HD931 DVD player since I got my Samsung DLP 50" HD set and I've never been overly fond of the unit, but it had DVI out and upscanning to some extent (though I now know it sucked). Movies would often lose audio sync with the 931 and lips would be moving well behind of the words. The 931 would also "catch up" video every so often which was also annoying as hell... the catch-up might have actually
been trying to get the audio re-synced now that I think about it. Also remote commands were not very responsive (not the remote control, the unit responding to the remote, I use a Harmony 880 to control my gear).

So enough about the old (which is available cheap if anyone would like to purchase it... say $50 and I'll pay shipping or best offer and you pay shipping) ... er... oh yeah, the new awesome Oppo OPDV97IH... what a frickin' model number for a company that only seems to have one DVD player on the market... it's awesome. :)

The Oppo has none of the issues my 931 had. Now that I've learned a bit more about what causes audio de-sync I can really appreciate the control that the Oppo gives you for audio control such as the ability to delay audio by a default of 50ms up to 100ms. Crouching Tiger had perfect sync throughout all of the high speed fight scenes and the like using 50ms of delay. Most excellent.

I also up converted from 480i to 720p which I could do on the Samsung, but it only made a little difference. On the Oppo though, the upscan was actually noticable which was nice. A lot less moire effect on parallel lines as well and of course less jaggies! :) The unit has some very capable hardware inside for the its MPEG decoder as well the Faroudja DCDi chip.

Especially for all of you Intellectual Property Thieves out in the audience, the unit plays damn near every format that I've seen: Plays DivX 5, DivX 4, DivX 3, and DivX VOD, XviD and .SRT, .SMI, .IDX and .SUB formats, VCD, SVCD, CD, HDCD, WMA, DVDR/RW, CD-R/RW, Kodak Picture.

I got mine from Amazon, came with both DVI and DVI-HDMI cables for $199. So far I love the unit, this morning, I'm fixing to watch me some Firefly on it. :)

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Not that I really know what all you're talking about in this post, but I wanted to drop by and say hi. Good to see you blogging again. Hope all is well with you :)

Crys/Cyana/Amaris/etc