Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater New Oppo 983

If you want a really nice upscaler to hold you over until a good Bluray choice, you should be able to find a Toshiba HD player for next to nothing these days, $75 and under even. It has an Excellent upscaling engine and there are still lots of HD movies to be had out there and they are all going on sale.

As long as you can get over the funny looks when they think you are a sucker for buying one. Just explain that under $75 is a steal for a really good upscaler even if the format is dead.

Some people claim that the upcaling engine on the low end Toshiba HD players is not that good. I personally have not compaired them.

I already have a PS3 but I was thinking that the new Oppo's upscaler would do a much better job that the PS3 with my large library of dvd's.

- Nick

Most any review I have read has been positive. However, that could be coincidental. The only side by side comparison I can give you is that my own A2 (lower end model) does a FANTASTIC job of upscaling my regular DVDs to 1080i compared to the job done by my Denon receiver. Even my wife commented on the difference and she normally couldn't care less how things look or sound.

Murph,

I would love to do a side by side comparision, Toshiba HD ver the Oppoe 981. No one I know has a HD player. To bad your in PEI, a little far from me.

Anyone in the Montreal area interested in performing this comparision test? I'll provide the Oppo 981 player.

I have the Oppo 981, Toshiba HD-A2 as well as the HD-XA2. I thought the A2 was noticeably better than the 981 in SD-DVD upconversion. I then bought the XA2 and it was even better than the A2 so I returned the A2.

John

I already have a region 1 upconverting player since I have the PS3 so the HDDVD player is not needed. What I want is a good upconverting player that plays all the different region encoded dvd's and pal ones as well. This leads me to the Oppo. For an extra $200 over the Oppo 981 I can get probably the best dvd player that will ever be made.

I don't see why everyone is having such a hard time wanting to pay $400 for a dvd player that is probably as good as the $1500 Denon. Lets face it DVD's aren't going anywhere any time soon. I would love if any movie that I wanted I could just get a Blu Ray version of but that isn't an option. I don't think that even in 5 years that will be an option since there are still plenty of people that only have a 32" tv or less. These people won't be able to see the difference from a dvd and a blu ray disc on their tv. Then there are people like my father-in-law who has had a 50" HDTV for a while now and only has basic (non-digital and non-HD) cable and thinks that he is watching high def. I have tried to explain to him how to hook his television up correctly several times but he just doesn't believe me. He is also has his dvd player hooked up with composite cables.

- Nick

This is good news between this and what you were saying earlier.

"An insider from Oppo mentioned that the 983 will be equally as good as the Toshiba's XA2 in upconversion, and to his eyes, 983 was perhaps slightly better."

I might just have to pick up one of these. I noticed that over at HKflix.com you can get 2 free dvd's with a purchase of one of these players. Heck the Oppo even comes with a HDMI cable too. Sounds like a good buy to me.

- Nick

nickboros - I've owned the same sources that ihifi mentioned, with the exception that I had the Oppo 970, and I agree with his comments. However, if region free is a requirement then Oppo is probably the way to go.

Many people have put the A2 and 981 about the same...

...everyone agrees that Reon is better

...everyone agrees that Realta is better (but you can only find that in Denon/Marantz $2K DVD players, or some projectors)

With Oppo having chosen the new Anchor Bay chip one would trust that it is better than Reon (as it was a design-in choice) and cheaper than Realta (hopefully better in some respects too).

I'm hoping it will be this year that Oppo releases their Blu-ray player as it is certain to have great upconversion too.