Blu-ray Ithaca NY

It was in September of last year that we first got wind that OPPO was developing a Blu Ray player. Since then we have received a boatload of emails asking us when it would become available. The good news for those who have asked is the answer is it is available today! The BDP-83 can be found online for $499.99 and is available at the HT Guys store.

Features

• Universal Blu-ray disc player providing playback for a myriad of video formats
• Supports Blu-ray, SACD, DVD-Audio, DVDs, and CDs
• 24 Frames per second support
• Two USB ports allow for playback of media stored on a flash drive
• Uses award-winning video processing chip for a clear, true picture
• Device measures 17.0 x 3.0 x 13.25 inches (WxHxD)

Setup

It looks like OPPO has taken a page out of the Apple Playbook, minimalistic and elegant. OPPO includes a high quality HDMI cable with the product which is a nice touch. They want you to have a great out of the box experience. We connected power, Ethernet (required for automatic updates and BD Live capability), and HDMI. The HDMI was connected to our Pioneer receiver and we were off to the races. Our 65 inch Mitsubishi DLP TV is already properly calibrated so no tweaking was done to the player. But if you chose to you can adjust the player to dial in the picture.

Blu Ray

The first thing you notice is that the player loads discs faster than any other player we have owned or used. This is nothing to just brush off. The Samsung 1400 that the OPPO replaced took so long that you could go an pop some corn before the movie was on screen. As far as video quality goes, it was quite good, but we wouldn't say it was any better than than other players in its class. Same goes for the audio. Both audio and video quality are a function of the mastering of the disc. We can say that the OPPO player did not affect the quality adversely. The player will decode Dolby True HD and DTS Master Audio and send it to the receiver via HDMI in PCM format or through its 7.1 analog outputs. We chose to send a bitstream version of the audio to the receiver just because we like seeing "True HD" on the front of the receiver. If all things were equal vs other players we would recommend the OPPO based on load times alone. But there is more to love about this player. Keep reading.

Up Converting Standard DVDs

This is where the OPPO outshines its competition. OPPO is know for building great upconverting DVDs players so we had high expectations when this unit arrived. The BDP-83 did not disappoint! The upconversion was as good as their former top of the line player the DV-983H because OPPO is using the same Anchor Bay deinterlacing and scaling technology. The Player easily passed all the tests on the HQV Benchmark Di...