Category electronics

It seems that I’m now able to order another x0xb0x kit. So, I shall. This one is more of an investment, though… Something easy / fun to build which I can slap my remaining piece of custom artwork on and sell on eBay. Or something. :)

It’ll be about $360 total, but I think it’ll be worth it…

OPPO DV-970HD Upconverting HDMI DVD (and more) Player

Yesterday while and were over here for birthday things, the FedEx driver left my new DVD player in the garage so quietly I didn’t even hear the truck drive up. Because of yesterday’s activities I put off unboxing and setting up the player until today.

Well, as part of setting it up I took a number of photos of the unboxing of the player, the inside of it, etc. While deciding if I wanted to purchase the player I couldn’t find any good photos of the player, the remote, things like that. Since I normally find photos like this useful, I decided to take some in hope that others would find them useful.

First, I found out that AV Science is selling the players for US$149, plus $10 for FedEx shipping. While the players are available with free shipping via Amazon, I didn’t want to wait the typical two weeks that it takes for free shipping items to arrive.

The player arrived in a brown cardboard box. The box looked like it had been dropped on the corner a few times, but opening the box showed enough packing material that this was not a concern at all. Inside the box was the instruction manuals, a box containing the cables and remote, and the OPPO DV-970HD player itself, in a black cloth bag similar to what iPods ship in. (Strangely, this bag has hook and loop fastener closures.)

The remote is nicely sized and contains all the needed buttons, and also glows in the dark. Somewhat unlike most other players I’ve come across, the OPPO HD-970HD comes with a rather nice HDMI cable. (I’m using this cable, because initial testing has shown that allowing the player to upscale DVDs to 1080i looks best on my TV.) There are also a couple of audio cables in the package, but I’m not using either of those. Thankfully the player as a TOSLINK connector on the back, so I’m able to use that, just as I was with my old Sony S550D. (Rear view of player.)

This player also plays SACD, and (due to stupid restrictions on SACD) outputs the audio to the on-board 5.1 connectors. I still have to make cables to go between that and my receiver, but it’ll be nifty to give some of the surround sound discs a listen. (The player will also downsample / downmix them to stereo for digital output.) DivX support seems pretty good, although the only files I’ve tried playing are test encodings as part of the DivX TestCD v2.0.

One rather nifty thing about this player is that it’ll play supported media from either flash drives or USB v1.1 mass storage devices via the front panel card reader / USB connector.

I currently only have one complaint about it, and that’s regarding the brightness of the LED display on the front panel of the player. To put it simply, it’s brighter than anything else near my TV. I might look into either changing the resistors to dim it or simply unplugging it, but I’m not sure yet.

That all said, and while I haven’t taken the time to calibrate everything against the TV (the whites seem a bit blown out, as some things were trailing on the screen while watching test discs) the image quality seems to be quite good thus far. DVDs look loads better than they did with either my old player or any of the low-cost ones I’d tried last week. Thus far, I’d definitely recommend getting this player, and with the really prompt shipping from AV Science I’d suggest getting it from them. Being a custom AV shop they don’t do online orders, but if you call them up they’ll do the order that way. (I think they aren’t normally a single-item online retailer, but they are selling these…)

If you’d like to see more pictures of the player and such, including inside of the player, here is my OPPO DV-970HD unpacking gallery (photo gallery retired). OPPO’s site with more info on the player is here, and a huge thread about it at the AVScience Forums is here.

Now, it’s time for Danielle and I to go get some Thai food and just relax.

(By the way, if you enter setup on this player and press 9210 on the remote, a screen indicating the current region is displayed. Pressing a new region code, such as 0 for all, will change the region code.)