Last night the carriage on my Opo BDP-93 stopped working so it won’t open to accept or eject disks. After a quick search on the internet I ran to Best Buy and picked up a Sony BDP-S590. It was between that and the comparable Panasonic (220 or 320 AFAIR). Sony won because they have always supported +R recordable media and Panasonic hasn’t which was a must for me since %99.99 of all my recorded DVDs are +R. It also played all the SACDs I put in it flawlessly. Also upconverted DVDs look as good as they ever did on the Opos.

Obviously I couldn’t do an A/B comparison but from what I did see/hear both PQ and SQ are as good with PQ possibly being slightly better in black level and contrast but that could easily be just different factory presets since I do my tweaking from the projector and haven’t run a calibration disk.

I have to say that I haven’t been terribly happy with the Opo for some time. It’s always had very long load times which normally isn’t a huge deal but does suck when doing demos and swapping between lots of disks. It’s also had constant HDMI dropouts about one to two minutes from starting a movie. It comes back up after a few seconds but it is rather annoying. More recently it’s required a restart of the receiver any time I changed disks or left one paused for long enough for the screen to time out. In both cases I had to restart the receiver to initiate a new HDMI handshake. I don’t suspect the receiver since nothing else requires this.

So it was pretty much a no-brainer to buy the Sony for $100 USD vs another Opo for $500 USD. I also saw no point in buying a Playstation. For many reasons a PS just wasn’t going to be worth the extra money though if I didn’t already have an Xbox360 it might have been in the running.


3M80 2M22 6QS8 2M2 1EP500 Sony BDP-S590 Panny-7000 Onkyo-3007 Carada-134 Xbox Buttkicker AS-EQ1