The price they are asking is $500. That's more than a PS3. Yes, I paid $1000 for my DV-79AVi, but I'd never do it again. Unless you're using the analog outs on the BDP-83, it's BD picture and sound quality is exactly the same as any other $150 player out there (digital is digital). Yes, it upscales DVDs better than any other player, but that's not enough, and the PS3 (along with other less expensive players) come close.
If you follow the BDP-83 thread on AVS, you'll see with every batch of new releases there's a few which don't play properly. The most recent were: European version of "Terminator Salvation", Indican's "The Wonder of It All", and "(500) Days of Summer" from Fox. All of which still require the beta firmware for their menus to work. Before that was: "X-Men Origins: Wolverine", "Lie to Me", "Dollhouse Season 1", "12 Rounds" and "The Haunting in Connecticut". This is well documented in the firmware release notes.
How do you have your player connected to your receiver, and the receiver to the TV? Analog, or S/PDIF are fine for CD playback. But if the player is HDMI to the receiver and the receiver HDMI to the TV, you're likely to miss the first second or two of audio CDs, and especially multi-channel SACDs. (I've experienced this first hand with an Oppo DVD player I installed for my boss at work, I was embarrassed that I couldn't solve the problem, and that I had sung the praises of the player. He's since gotten used to hitting Play, and then immediately hitting Track Back. Those two together solves the missing second.)
I'll never buy another Sony product except for their video game consoles. Yes, it was lucky/smart of them to do all of their BD decoding in software which can easily be updated to add new features, unlike all other players which have fixed chips. Oh, that's right, another niggle, the chip which Oppo uses for H.264 decoding
has a bug so it doesn't support playback of files created with the current version of x264, the most popular encoding software on the Internet. They are now at the mercy of MediaTek to fix it.
No, Sony, Denon, Pioneer, etc. don't have players which best Oppo's offering. They are all pretty much equal over HDMI for BD playback, and Oppo's video scaler is better for DVD. But that's where I come to my stance, that it doesn't make sense to buy this current Oppo model. It has enough little problems, that it isn't worth $500 to me. When I can get another player for $150 that also has a few little problems, or an excellent PS3 for $350 (or say $375, to deal with the remote control issue).
Just remembered another issue I have. The newest beta firmware adds a service called BluTV. It works like Netflix's disc for the PS3. By using BD-Live, it connects to a server and streams video. It uses BD-Java to generate the interface, and requires secondary audio for sound. There's the problem. All the tuning reports say to turn of BD-Live, because it causes loading problems with many discs. Even Oppo has advised in disabling secondary audio, because when it is on the player doesn't have enough DSP power to decode the lossless track, and falls back to the lossy cores. But here's a feature included by Oppo, which requires both of these to be on.
I'm not anti Oppo. But I'm saying that if one can wait, and make do with an exsiting PS3, or pick up a cheaper BD 2.0 player to fill the hole for now, that's probably the better way to go. Just wait for Oppo's next offering.
