LensRentals.com Macworld 2010 - San Francisco, CA Default LensRentals.com Default

Your source for all things digital.

Oppo DV-981HD upconverting DVD player

Posted by John P • February 22, 2007 • Printer-friendly • Feed • Share

This post is older than 120 days, there may be a newer article that is similar on our homepage or in the Consumer Electronics category.

Oppo DV-981HD DVD player

When you think of DVD players, you think of the major consumer electronics manufacturers: Sony, Panasonic, and Phillips, but you may not think of Oppo. Starting today, you will. Today, I take a look at the Oppo DV-981HD upconverting DVD player.

Oppo DV-981HD DVD player unboxed

In terms of design the Oppo is one of the sleekest and simplest designed DVD players I've seen, with a power button, drive tray, eject button, a nice sized LCD (LED?) screen, a play/pause button, and the stop button. The unit is available in black only, so you may want to look somewhere else if you are color-obsessive, but we found it blended in fine with our Westinghouse 37" 1080p LCD TV (more on this later). Oppo is also nice enough to throw in a gold-plated (!) HDMI cable in for hooking it up to your TV. The first thing we came across that wasn't very well-designed was the remote. It looked like it came out of an OEM vendor and they slapped their name on the front, they should have at least made it match the DVD player, but hey, at least it's glow in the dark.

The DV-981HD is capable of playing DivX movies burned to a CD or DVD and so I thought I'd try this feature out first. See here if you don't know what DivX is or if you need a better explanation. The DivX playback was excellent, just as we would have expected and did we mention it's easy as cake to make a CD or DVD with some DivX-formatted/converted movies on them? Just use the DivX software available at DivX.com. The only thing we didn't like was the presentation could use a better interface other than a directory full of files.

The DV-981HD DVD player, not to be confused with an HD DVD player, is an upconverting DVD player. For people who aren't exactly home theater experts, the upconverting process takes the small image of your regular standard-definition DVD and scales it bigger it to look good on your flat-screen HDTV while not throwing in any artifacts visible on the screen. We tested this with the Westinghouse 37" LCD TV I mentioned earlier, and every DVD we put in looked great, even older (but not too old) movies looked excellent.

Overall, the stunning quality of playing regular standard-definition DVD's on this DVD player was killer and compared to regular HD video (even compressed HD), we couldn't see a difference between the two. Besides the ugly remote and DivX playback interface, we were absolutely thrilled with this piece of equipment. The price is right and throwing in the HDMI cable is a steal. The Oppo DV-981HD is available for $230 at Oppo or Amazon.

Pros

  • Excellent video quality.
  • Free gold-plated HDMI cable.
  • Great design.
  • DivX-certified.

Cons

  • Ugly DivX interface.
  • Poorly designed remote.

Final Rating
4.5 out of 5 stars.



Similar Articles You Might Enjoy

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.