... Thats probably why the OPPO is so highly regarded is that its able to do this quite well ...
I think I've proven, to me, that the upscaling ability of the OPPO is overrated. It didn't seem to do any better with this DVD image than the cheaper players can do.
Now, I didn't see any such degradation with VUDU's image. I'm not sure why. It seems that some form of upscaling would be applied to those images as well. When VUDU was processing the 720, I looked closely at the image and didn't see anything that looked like a 720 TV image with the visible dots. It upscaled it to a 1080 and looked very good, like I've said previously.
