While some of the photos clearly show a real device, you can see that modesty has inclined lil’ Oppo to only be shown from the rear, save for in chaste rendering form. So hopefully the d-pad and traditional SNES/PlayStation four-button config makes it to the final stages of production. News today is pricing: 1099 yuan, or $US160. That only appears to buy you a paltry 4GB, but throwing together a true emulation platform along with some pedestrian MP3 playing capabilities into decent-looking swivel-screen hardware doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me. [Zol (translated) via PMP Today]

First, we can tell it’s going to be a step up from the bottom rung due to the presence of Ethernet port—signifying BD-Live (Blu-ray Profile 2.0) capability—and analogue 7.1 outputs. But what takes it beyond other players are the SACD and DVD-Audio logos on there. No current Blu-ray player can handle both of those formats as well as BD, DVD and CD.

OK, yes, we’re thinking what you’re thinking: The number of people who have collections of SACD and DVD-Audio is surely smaller than the number of people with HD DVD libraries—perhaps Oppo should have gone the full distance and put in HD DVD reading capability too. (We’ll be sure to ask them when they start talking about this product.)

Given the visible feature set and Oppo’s reputation in the upscaling world, we assume this will be one damn fine BD player. But I’ll just say right now that it won’t be cheap. [AVS Forum via Electronista]

UPDATE: Here’s what Oppo confirms—no HD DVD of course, just as we suspected:

The BDP-83 will be a Profile 2.0 that features the ABT 2010 de-interlacing and scaling solution for both DVD and Blu-Ray media. The product as currently implemented supports SACD. We are investigating the possibility of DVD-Audio support.

The player will support the transportation and decoding of the Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital TrueHD, DTS High Resolution, and DTS HD-Master. In the current implementation only the core DD and DTS are supported, but the hardware will support the transportation and decoding of these formats in the future.

No price has been established, but we are throwing around US$499~699 as the possible price points. Anticipated release is Winter (November through February)

The Price: US$399

The Verdict: Video quality is as least as good if not better than the previous Oppo 981HD we reviewed, which also does 1080p over HDMI. Even better than the 981, this DV-983H adds in a USB port in the back so you can play back DivX/XviD files off of a USB drive directly, without having to burn movies/TV Shows onto a disc first.

We watched several DVDs and were impressed with the quality, and the AV nerds on avsforum seem to prefer Anchor Bay’s ABT1018 and ABT102 upconverting/de-interlacting magic chips to Faroudja’s. On the audio side, we only have a 5.1 setup, but what we heard sounded great as well.

At US$399, it’s a player we’d recommend if you have a gigantic DVD library that you want to keep even when faced with the impending Blu-ray transition. After all, there’s no sense in buying a movie again if you can get a somewhat reasonable upscaler (and Oppo’s is much more than just somewhat reasonable). It’s their new flagship model, so you know this is quality DVD playback. It’s also the last upconverting DVD player Oppo will ever make, so you might want to get in on this latest generation before it goes out of style. [Oppo]