Oppo BDP-83 Blu-ray Player Gets Near-Perfect CNet Rating

I really wish review sites will stop factoring in price as an attribute. I don't care about price. Real home theater fans shouldn't either. I mean, $500 is pretty cheap in my book. I've spent $3500 on my display, $1750 on my receiver, and $3200 for my speakers. Why would the price of a Blu-ray player deter me from buying it. I look at it like this...We spend what, $75 for each trip to the theater? After 7 Netflix rentals, the player has paid for itself. I don't think a product should get dinged because the lower middle class can't afford it.

@Diddle my Skittles: Well excuuuse me for trying to be practical and budget-conscious despite my (non-existent) wealth

@chauncy that billups: Tell me, do you use your work truck to drive your family on a trip, or do you use a sedan or van? Sometimes, I use a blender to make drinks, and not the food processor. Truth be told, that PS3 plays movie line is stupid. I don't want to play my movies on a PS3. I want to play my games on a PS3. Why would I want to wear down the motor of the optical drive two fold, when I can reduce the wear and tear by having a dedicated Blu-ray player?

@★ graffiksguru: Well, tickets are $10.50 each for me and the woman, and $7.50 for each one of my sons. So for all four of us it's $36 alone for the tickets. (That's not including the 15% bump for Imax.) Then $4.75 for each drink. $4.50 to $7 for a hot food item. Then you have $2 to $4 for candy and/or popcorn. So yeah, about $75 to $85 a trip. Which is why, one, we only watch 2 movies a year. Two, why no one in my home complained when I spent over $13,000 on the home theater room.

OPPO player is a high end DVD player that probably belongs in an expensive home theater setup. It has the VRS DVD up-scaling image processor and all kinds of high end audio decoders built-in. I have a lower-end DVD upscaling player and it is just amazing for my big screen tv. Though having Wifi would have been great.

OPPO has a big cult following among folks who spend hours tweaking audio/video hardware and those who spend tens of thousands of dollars on their home theater setup The video/audio-philes will probably snatch this player up in a jiffy.

astroboy888

@chauncy that billups: The PS3's Blu-Ray playback is the worst you can find on the market. It's a lot like the bastard child of a DVD and Blu-Ray player, better than DVD, but not on the same level as Blu-Ray players. When Blu-Ray came out, the quality was comparable to the stand-alone players, but now the PS3's Blu-Ray is still living in 2006.

pettiblay

@Diddle my Skittles: Wow, what theater are you going to? I spend $8 for a trip to the theater, $16 if I take the other half.

★ graffiksguru

@spannu: No longer.

@chauncy that billups: I thought the PS3 plays those too?

spannu

The PS3 is $299, people. And it plays games. And has Wi-Fi. But I guess if you want to spend an extra $200 to play the one SACD that might still be kicking around your house, have at it.

chauncy that billups

Is it the addition of SACD and DVD-Audio codecs that adds 5 lbs of extra weight to this thing above a normal Blu-Ray player?

Considering that the upper limit of a standakine blu-ray player price is $320 (Sony PS3 + remote, but you can find deals where the remote is thrown in), products more expensive than that are for people with more cash than they know what to do with.

And hell, it plays games, too.

Also, some of us are tired of reading about "oh it does this and this and this" and think it's perfect, only to find out it's way beyond what we want to spend.

The real question is, is this thing worth $180 more than a PS3 and remote?

Worf

I read "which sucks in BD,CD,DVD as well as SACD and DVD-Audio",as "which is terrible at everything!" at first,and got confused as to why CNet would love something that "sucked".

Am I the only guy who doesn't care about stuff like VOD? I mean, my 360 has Netflix-on-demand, as does my TiVo, and PCs, but I hardly ever use it. The quality seems to have gotten better in the last year+, but maybe I'm just picky about spotting how much better blu-ray is on a 46+" screen? Not to mention the hiccups, etc., when you try to do something like FF or REW.

@★ graffiksguru: Live in a major city like Chicago, and $10.50 is the price of the freakin' matinee -- $12 full price. Ridiculous, I know...

@MPerlo9: So you barge in here, tell me, without any hard facts, that what I'm saying is completely inaccurate, without actually shelling out any proof of why it's a superb player, and you want me to tell you why I don't think it's worth a dime as a Blu-Ray player? *sigh* I'll do it anyways: The PS3 has a lot of problems you'll never ever see on a standalone player, like overheating issues, etc. There are many reports of grainy pictures, motion blur and other sorts of technical issues like getting it to output high-quality sound, which can be tricky for people who don't know what they're doing. NO ONE should ever buy a PS3 as a standalone Blu-Ray player, but it's a welcome addition if you're buying the thing for the games.

pettiblay

I'm planning on getting one, but the price is stopping me. My 60GB PS3 is nice, but it's noisy as heck and hot. I considered a lower end BR player -- a Samsung BDP-1600, the BR playback was super, but the DVD upscaling wasn't as good as my Oppo DV-980H DVD player or PS3. I just bought a Samsung 46" LED-backlit LCD, and it's brutal on video sources -- I could see differences in how well the DVD sources were upscaled -- and I have a lot of DVDs.

@chauncy that billups: fair point. the oppo does have a few more bonus features; top of the line upscaling, multichannel analog audio outputs, and yes, slightly better bluray playback. but if you have any interest at all in gaming, then the ps3 is the way to go.

MPerlo9

@JonThomasDesigns: Precisely. Those other players are probably just doing a lot of post-processing "enhancements".

@JonThomasDesigns: Any USB cable is going to take a picture from your camera and store it on your computer. When you have a good lens, sensor, and overall good camera, what gets extracted to your computer is of better quality than if you were to have taken the picture with crappy equipment.

pettiblay

@pettiblay: that couldn't possibly be more inaccurate. if you feel otherwise, please feel free to articulate concrete facts on why the PS3 is anything but a superb blu-ray player. got any?

MPerlo9

@pettiblay: Whatever happened to Digital is Digital 1's and 0's .. so all Blu-ray PQ should be the same .. right ? isn't that what people use to diss Monster cable with the monoprice HDMI ? i am asking a serious question i know that VRS is top of the line for dvd .. but that has nothing to do with Blu-ray

@pettiblay: Madness! It still plays better than most of today's mid-range players and can still rival a lot of high-end models too.

@Diddle my Skittles: In my case I rarely watch movies from a disc at all anymore so I only play Blu-Rays on my PS3 a couple times a month.

@MPerlo9: Good job speaking the inconvenient truths to pettybaby.

It's funny how for years, the brag point for the PS3 over the X360 has been how cool and quiet it was. Suddenly, the PS3 is a noisy furnace that is manure as a BD player?!? What?!?

The PS3 was designed by Sony as a Blu-ray Trojan horse FIRST, LAST AND ALWAYS with gaming an secondary consideration because they were relying on the 120 million PS2 buyers to rush out and give them a disc format win. This is why so few developers can get good gaming results out of the thing - it was designed for fanboy bullet-point regurgitation and movie playing, not actual gaming.

The irony of all this though is that while the hardware is all fairly comparable, the DISCS are still prone to slipshod QC, as this week's botched BD of Gladiator showed compared to Braveheart. Doesn't matter if you've paid $300 or $500 for your player when the disc they're reading are junk. GIGO.

Alf Shot The FUD

@chauncy that billups: Hey, I have quite a few SACDs, and I'm really kind of pissed that the PS3 doesn't play them. Be nice to be able to finally get rid of my old DVD player that's sticking around just for my SACD/DVD-A needs. Oh and for region-free stuff. Can't forget that.

jethro1138

@MPerlo9: Anyone can throw links around. I can find links of people that actually think Perez Hilton deserves respect. I read one of your links, saw nothing in the article about Blu-Ray quality, and am pretty much done arguing with someone who doesn't understand my point. Would you buy an LG fridge with a screen to watch TV in your living room? The PS3 is NOT a Blu-Ray player, it's a gaming console. The overall Blu-Ray quality of the PS3 suffers from the other features of the PS3.

Oh, Match Point.

pettiblay

@pettiblay: I'll let some professionals do the talking:

1) Home Theater Magazine - [www.hometheatermag.com]

2) CNET - [reviews.cnet.com]

3) Ultimate AV - [www.ultimateavmag.com]

Game, set, and match.

MPerlo9

@pettiblay: Well the slim PS3 fixes high-quality audio output (which wasn't bad to begin with). And overheating was only somewhat common with the original 90nm PS3s. The 40GB and later consoles ran cool and quiet.

@Dahamma: You're completely retarded. The analogies are there to make you understand that a cable is essentially metallic wire, whereas the optics of the camera changes from model to model. I read one of the reviews (CNET's) and stopped afterwards because there is nothing in the article about the output quality of the PS3. The fridge was to make you understand that if you just wanna listen to Blu-Ray movies, you don't need the console capabilities (Since you're obviously retarded, I'll just try to make you understand that the fridge isn't really useful if all you wanna do is watch TV, so the fridge just sits there, cooling it's insides, like the gaming parts of the PS3 if you just watch Blu-Rays). Next, to actually output high quality to an amp/receiver whatever, is exactly what I meant; you have to look around in the settings to send it uncompressed or something, that's in the review that I read, that you obviously didn't. I'm not sending you any reports because the majority of them come from Radio and TV shows. I've also already watched a Blu-Ray movie at one friend's house, and we had to restart the console twice (maybe the disc was scratched, I couldn't tell you, so it may or may not be the PS3's fault).

@MPerlo9: I get your point, but the user interface part is completely wrong. In a standalone player you just pop the disc in and it plays, no interface needed at all, but on the PS3 you sometimes need to browse some menus to access the movie.

pettiblay

@chauncy that billups: the only reason i would ever choose a stand alone player is for the energy savings.

but at this price point, how can you not want a game system instead?

I am a bit of an AV nut with about $25k into my cinema room (including $10k for designing/building out the room) and have over 700 DVDs/BDs. I currently think VOD sucks for a 120" screen with 7.1 sound - the bitrate is much too low at this time, but that should improve in the next 10 years or so.

Over a year ago I got a PS3 as my Blu-Ray player because at that time it was the best BD player under $1000 and did good upconversion of regular DVDs. But really I was just waiting for whatever BD device Oppo would release so I could relegate the PS3 to a pure games machine.

I got the BD8P-3 about 2 months ago - it destroys the PS3 on sound and is noticeably better on picture quality. I tested using two copies of the same Blu-Ray disc and flicking back and forth across the players over the same video segment but only 'measured' using eyes/ears of various people that didn't know which device was playing.

This is my 3rd Oppo device in 5 years - they make the absolute best players for the money if AV quality is important to you - check out AVSForum for more info.

pelucidor

@pettiblay: wow, you think you "won" that argument? Your analogies make no sense.

First you compare a BD player to a camera, which is a horrible comparison. The comparison there would be the *camera* that shot the movie and the compression software that encoded it.

Next, you compare a *monitor* (since the fridge comment is just obscuring the already bad analogy) to a BD player. The correct analogy would be to compare your MONITOR (aka "TV") to a monitor.

Anyone who cares the slightest about quality would connect their BD player to a receiver/pre-amp/TV through HDMI and/or SPDIF, so audio quality is 100% irrelevant. If you are not, then just stick with DVD.

Finally, the MPerlo offered 3 reviews from experienced professional reviewers stating that the PS3 output quality is "essentially perfect according to the test patterns at my disposal, right out to the very limits of the format." You obviously didn't read very much of it. You also provide nothing concrete to support your claims besides "There are many reports..." Who's the one who has not actually "shelled out any proof"?

@Alf Shot The FUD: Right on the mark, Alf! Such a shame about Gladiator, right? I feel sorry for the poor sap who buys a new Blu-ray player and the movie at the same time only to spend the next 2 hours wondering what all the fuss over this "HD stuff" is about.

MPerlo9

@pettiblay: On the contrary the PS3's blu-ray capabilities benefit from it's multifunctional nature. It features the faster loading times than all but 1 or 2 standalones because of its powerful Cell processor and its firmware is constantly being upgraded. And going back to a point you made in a previous post; because its a gaming console it has a user interface that's crafted to be as accessible and easy to use to the broadest number of people possible. I'm not trying to be antagonistic, I just think that its irresponsible to pass judgment on products and make recommendations when you don't really know all that much about it. Here is a quote that pretty much sums up what you and I are talking about:

"The PS3 remains my first choice in a Blu-ray Disc player, and by a wider margin than ever, more than a year after its introduction. Not bad for a Blu-ray player whose day job is being a game console." -Shane Buettner, Home Theater Magazine

MPerlo9

@weatherman: It is strange that it includes those codecs, but who cares about 5 extra pounds on a component device? Unless you have weak shelves or something...

And hopefully I will have mine soon. I'll relegate my very trusty DV-981H to audio-only use which is a role it plays quite well. A shame in a way because it's a great DVD player but I'm slowly making my way into the 21st century.

BobFraggle

@pettiblay: If you could provide *ONE SINGLE LINK* that states that the visual or audio quality coming from the PS3 is in any way less than PERFECT, then you'll have made your point. Just one. And I'm not talking about not outputting certain audio formats in their original format - that doesn't affect quality, it's just an extra feature, since the PS3 will decode those formats perfectly by itself.

Is the PS3 the perfect Blu-Ray player, well, not quite - the old one is huge and its fan is fairly loud (both fixed with the new PSP Slim), it doesn't come with the remote, when your controller's battery gets low an annoying message pops up on the screen, and the console sucks up electricity like nothing else. But you can't compare it to crappy DVD players, because DVD's had problems that Blu-Ray has fixed: *many* DVD's were encoded incorrectly, so the player always had to guess how to decode the DVD and display it correctly, and quite often they have to guess at every frame. Great DVD players were great at figuring it out, crappy DVD players trusted the disc or guessed wrong. DVD players also have different quality upconversions (when using an upconverting DVD player).

The PS3 outputs all Blu-Ray discs exactly as encoded, both audially and visually.

Dreamwriter

@chauncy that billups: AND CAN BE UPDATED WITH NEW FIRMWARE. PS3 IS SIMPLY THE STANDARD AND THE "BAR"

@pelucidor: even if its optical out, it is still a digital signal and should only be affected by your reciever decoding, no? The same 1's and 0's are being sent. you sure the output isnt being pumped up by the oppo via some settings?

irfan

@irfan: My AV processor is 2 years old and does not handle DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD. I am using analog out from the Oppo BDP-83 (processing sound internally) whereas on the PS3 I had to use optical fiber (TOSLINK). New processor in the budget around Christmas.

pelucidor

@weatherman: No that is just the weight of quality you feel.

Assassin_Kensei

@chauncy that billups: My 60 gig plays SACDs score one for early adapters.

Assassin_Kensei

@pelucidor: if you are outputting lossless audio from both, shouldnt the audio be identical? If you are noticing a difference then it must be a setup problem.

How did you run your test? Did you have the 2 players on seperate calibrated inputs? if not, its not a valid test. playing 1080/24 w/o and video "enhancements" the picture quality should be identical to any BD player.

irfan

@pettiblay: you really lost any validity with the "youre retarded" comment. The camera analogy still doesnt hold water because that is referring to CREATING content from an anolog world into a digital picture, which I hope you realize a BD player does not do. We arent talking about production or display, we are talking about a digital transport. The CORRECT camera analogy is: If i take the jpg file from my camera and copy it to my $5000 computer, and then upload it to flickr... will the quality be any higher than if I copied it to my $500 computer and uploaded it to flickr? answer: no. the computer is just delivering the information much like the BD player it just delivering the information, it has NOTHING to do with the encoding process, optics, or anything else other than whether or not it can read a 0 and send out a 0, (or 1's).Your fridge analogy is worthless because the fridge would be an obvious detriment to the the home theater experience. Having a PS3 play blurays is not affecting the home theater experience in any way other than saving you $200 compared to the Oppo. Does it matter that a ps3 that is roughly the same size as any other component, and quiet (cant hear mine) is playing the disc vs a dedicated player? NO. High quality playback, low noise, lower cost, and not distracting from the experience whatsoever= perfectly fine BD player.You can take the $200 you save and put $25 towards a remote, and $175 for the psychotherapy you must need if you think a coule extra clicks to get to a movie is that much of a hinderance.

BTW- im only talking about BD playback, not SD DVD upconversion, which isnt the topic.

irfan

@chauncy that billups: or if you want an all-in-one high fidelity audio/video device that doesn't degrade the sound of CD, SACD, or BluRay the way the PS3 does you could get the Oppo.

Don Sibley

@pettiblay: Fail. Everybody else makes more salient points than you do. No data, no win.

Thangka

The cnet review mentions that media (including mkv files) can can be played with a USB flash drive via the USB hub on the machine. Anyone know if it will also accept a USB hard drive with media stored on it as well?

DavGins

@irfan: Hah, yeah, I was amazed that the best he could come up with was "you're retarded"...

I very well may be retarded... though I guess no one figured it out while I got my CSE degree from Stanford, or was an engineer working on various STBs, DVRs, and streaming movie players over the last 15 years... :)

I have had several BD players (some not yet released) in the office, comparing qualities of BD discs, as well as every streaming service available... but no, you must be the expert, because "I've also already watched a Blu-Ray movie at one friend's house". Can't top that. Brilliant!

Ok, I should let this thread die, it's like beating a retarded child... oh, wait, is that me??