Well I finally did it, I purchased my first DVD Player. I figured I'd wait out a full 15 years for the technology to reach perfection before I jumped the gun (right, right). I'm now the pround owner of the venerable Oppo 983. Seriously, this is my very first DVD player. Now I had high expectations for this player, after all its the only player ever to score 100/100 on the Secrets DVD benchmark, scoring even higher than the reference Denon 5910 ($3,800), the king of DVD players.

Now don't get me wrong, my friends think I'm insane to drop $399 on an upconverting DVD Player now that Blu-Ray has won the war (though a number of my friends do own the Oppo 981), but my thoughts are..

1. The 983 offers superior DVD playback to any Blu-Ray player on the market
2. Blu-Ray titles are still ridiculously expensive, however I can now pickup DVD titles for $6-$10 at my local retailers
3. There are multitudes more DVD titles available for purchase, including all of my old favorites
4. I honestly don't think Blu-Ray will survive as a format for a few reason.. a) 90% of American households own DVD players, b) HD resolution is only really beneficial for households with 46" and larger sets, I have only a 37" set c) I foresee Blu-Ray being replaced in a few years with on-demand technologies, d) now that the PS3 has stablized in the marketplace, there has been little to no growth for Blu-Ray, e) consumers have been hit too many times with dead formats in the past 30 years, from 8-track to cassette to beta to laserdisk to SACD and DVD-Audio, so they are now wary to invest in any new format, and finally, g) i have concerns with the DRM in these new formats, i refuse to let the studio's have any say in how i use my own private, personal property

Needless to say, I fired up the 983, connected her to my Sharp Aquos D62.. and wow. Looked like s**t. I was shocked, I couldn't believe how awful this player was, especially considering this significant of an investment into a DVD player late in the game.

I had a bite to eat, fumed for a bit, then went to pick up the manual to see how I could tweak her. This is when I came across the little HDMI button on my remote. Well its no wonder the player was looking like s**t, the player defaults to 480i, so my Sharp was doing the upconversion to 1080p. I quickly rectified this by setting the player to 1080p.

Holy hell, I couldn't believe what I was now seeing, this is easily the finest DVD playback I have ever seen. Stunning picture quality, very film like, smooth like you wouldn't believe. I'm simply shocked that this tiny little player can deliver this level of quality. VRS video processing by Anchor Bay is exceptional, better even than Silicon Optix HQV used in the Denon players (which is no surprise, I've always been a huge fan of Anchor Bay's DVDO outboard video processors).

On top of this, the Oppo manual is superbly written, the packaging was excellent, there are regular firmware upgrades for the player, Oppo offers a 30-day money back guarantee, it's a simple process to make her region free, analogue audio playback is very good, and I now have an SACD and DVD-Audio Player.

Highly recommend. Welcome me to the 90's.

cheers,
elapsed