First Impressions of my OPPO Blu-Ray.
First let me qualify that while I'm a BIG OPPO fan from my time with 931 upconverting DVD, believe me it they'd screwed the pooch on this one I'd tell you. Here are my impressions of the product from 3 days and intensive nights of diddling and fiddling.
Packaging and Swag
Packaged and shipped beautifully. Comes with all the cables and cords you need except 5.1 or 7.1 analog outs. Still, they give more stuff that some other companys do. The ole lady loved the OPPO tote bag. The remote is a clear upgrade of previous OPPO offerings. This thing is nice, just the right size, good button size, backlit with good ergonomics. Only debit is they put the backlight button on the lower right hand side of the unit, it requires a second hand to use it. Small quibbles though.
Initial Setup
Easy, peasey, nice and greasy. The setup routine is caveman simple and quite well done. You'd have to be pretty brain dead not to get some picture or sound out of this unit with this basic set up. Of course due to the variations of gear out there the advance settings will be necessary to "dial-in" to your own specific hook-up. Manual was/is marvelously well written and laid out. Did find a couple of menu items "out of place" in there but a quick check of the page before or after usually yielded the information.
Blue Ray Play-Back Visual
The unit ships with two set up disks, one for audio one for visual. The first Blu-Ray product I ever viewed at home was the visual demo's on this disk. They looked "spectacular". Puddin said "it's like you can reach your hand in there and touch things". I concurred. The first Blu-Ray movie we watched however "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" really didn't impress me all that much. Perhaps it's because it was letter boxed with bars on the top and bottom or I was sitting too far away? I don't know. I watched a regular DVD the following day though and the upconversion was handled strictly by the OPPO and it was stunning.
Sound? Oh my gawd, while not quite as obvious as the switch from Mono to Stereo but damn close. My Onkyo 905, despite being a couple years old, is HDMI 1.3a so it handles all those fancy smancy audio tracks that Blu-Rays ship with and that Sir TT has painstakingly mastered. The difference between a DTS soundtrack and Blu-Ray was striking and stunning. Everything, music demos to movies was clear, articulate and just plain gorgeous. Wow.
Summary
Puddin' was upset when I told her I bought a Blu-Ray player, particularly a $500 dollar one. But she thought the big screen was an extravagance now she can't live without it. I'm sure that as we get more titles and experience with Blu-Ray she'll feel about it like all the other tech I've bought the last couple of years. I'll have to reserve any praise on Blu-Ray visuals for a bit until I see some more movies, but I've no reservations about the OPPO's sound reproduction. It is mind blowing. No final grade yet but I'll keep you all apprised.
Da Worfster