OPPO OPDV971H Digital HD-Ready Up-Converting DVD Player
No better than our Existing Progressive Scan Toshiba
We purchased this unit to upgrade from our Toshiba SD-3900, viewing on a Hitachi 57F500 widescreen HD CRT television. Right out of the box we had problems -- no signal through the manufacturer-provided DVI cable. After buying a $100 Monster DVI cable we got our picture, only to find that when compared to our progressive scan Toshiba some DVD's looked only very marginally better, while some looked very marginally worse. We upgraded the firmware but this made no qualitative difference. With one recent film we happened to have two discs and were able to play them simultaneously on different video inputs and make a very apples-to-apples immediate comparison. We've always been happy with our Toshiba but with the true HD-DVD format wars going on we hoped to get more out of our existing library of DVDs. We weren't expecting true high definition comparable to HD cable broadcasts, but based on other reviews we were expecting an obvious improvement. In retrospect we realize our Toshiba is a pretty good machine on its own. And we're $300 richer again since we returned the Oppo and the Monster cable. If you have a cheap DVD player this might make a good upgrade since it's reasonably priced, but if you already have a good DVD player don't expect too much improvement.