OPPO OPDV971H Digital HD-Ready Up-Converting DVD Player
A great player with a fatal flaw
This is a truly great DVD player.  The picture is superb, and it plays absolutely everything I can throw at it from any region with any format.  Having a DVI output for this price with these features is amazing.  It also looks like OPPO has responsive customer support, and keeps up with new firmware updates to handle new formats.  I really wish I could give the player 5 stars, but it has three flaws; one minor, one significant, and one fatal. <br /> <br />Minor:  The player allows you to select many magnifications going from 1/4x to 4x zoom.  It has every possible magnification you can think of, except the one I want.  I occasionally will watch fansubtitled video in which the person who made the subtitles placed the subtitles at the very bottom of the picture.  However, if I watch the video on an analog TV, the TV clips a bit of the picture so only the top of the subtitles gets shown.  (Note: TV's clip the edges of video by design, but many people are not aware of this, including many fansubbers.)  What would be nice is an 80% or 90% zoom so I can see the entire picture with the full subtitles and without much wasted screen space.  However, the largest zoom the OPPO has below full screen is 1/2x, which makes the picture much too small.  Although an 80% or 90% zoom would be a great bonus, it's an unusual enough feature that I wouldn't ding OPPO for not including it. <br /> <br />Significant:  This player has the worst remote control I've ever seen!  The remote is too thin for an adult male hand.  The buttons are almost all in a simple rectangular-grid pattern labeled with a single color (white) using a small font.  This generic, unimaginative style makes it *very* hard to figure out which button you need to push to do anything without looking closely at the remote and reading all the buttons until you get to the one you want.  Even worse, a number of the labels were placed *below* the clear curved-plastic buttons, making them unreadable if you look at the remote at an angle.  On top of that, similar buttons aren't necessarily grouped near each other.  For example, the \\"goto\\" button is many rows away from other movement buttons (\\"play\\", \\"fast forward\\", \\"A-B\\", etc.).  All the features you want on a remote are there, but good luck finding them.  OPPO needs to throw away this remote, and design a new one from scratch.  Heck, I've seen enough good ones that I'd be happy to design one for them.  By the way, OPPO's web site mentions there have been two remotes for this player.  I'm talking about the newer, black remote.  If the remote I have is their new and improved model, I'd hate to see what the previous one was like! <br /> <br />Fatal:  This player frequently pauses and freezes for a short time playing back some DVD's.  It's great that it can play so many formats and regions, but being able to play them at full speed is priority number one!  If it can't do that, it's useless.  From what I've seen, it especially freezes playing back DVD's made from DVR's, but I've also seen it freeze on occasion playing back AVI's.  I contacted OPPO about it, and they're aware of the problem, but won't know until sometime in late September 2005 if a fix is even possible.  Even if the freezes can be fixed, they have no estimate about when a fix would become available in a firmware upgrade. <br /> <br />So if all you're going to do is play commercial DVD's, and bad remotes don't bother you, definitely buy this player.  It's great!  Should OPPO fix the freeze problem, I'd give the player 4 stars, and recommend it to everyone, even with the awful remote.  If they also redesign a better remote - and anything would be better than their current one! - I'd rate the player 5 stars. <br />