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Oppo / Sony / Pioneer / Panasonic

11K views 41 replies 19 participants last post by  Shackmonster 
#1 ·
Have been doing a lot of reading on these Blu-ray players.

Everyone raves over the Oppo. But the upscale models from Pioneer (Elite) and Sony (ES) seem to offer some features that Oppo does not care about or just simply ignores.

Pioneer offers great flexibility in picture adjustment/calibration which seems like it would be a desirable feature. Plus, they have the Wolfson DAC's which are generally thought to offer superior audio.

In a recent online review of the Panasonic DMP-BD60, the reference source was the Oppo. The reviewer stated that "you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two players using good quality blu-ray material".

Is Oppo the "Holy Grail" of Blu-ray?

Just curious..................
 
#39 ·
I too my the 1000ES and can't imagine the Oppo could be noticeably better (if better at all) in the PQ category. I'd like to have BOUGHT the Oppo myself but the Sony was at a price I couldn't resist! And I'm not sorry I did, it's a very very fine BD player.

The Oppo 83 is no doubt on top-of-the-BD-world but not everyone wants to pay the price, and some of us can't discern among the finer features of the thing (e.g. audio quality--my ears aren't any good any more). :sad:
 
#41 · (Edited)
My Panasonic DMP-BD50 Blu-ray player outshines my Denon 2910 Universal DVD player when it comes to playing standard DVDs, particularly in terms of automatically figuring out the correct aspect ratio, so I don't have to go into setup to manually switch between film-formatted widescreen disks and 4:3 formatted old TV shows. It also shows the (admittedly-rare) subtitles in English-language films like Attack of The Clones, when Chancellor Palpatine's holographic desktop intercom pops up, which the Denon didn't show. The Denon is now reserved for SACD and DVD-Audio playback.

I second Mark's observations about the image quality of Attack of the Clones, the mid-air chase scene early in the film being a wonderfully-immersive experience when shown with a projector. (I use a Panasonic PT-AE2000U 1080p24/i60 LCD projector to throw an image 9½' x 5 1/3' high.)

My theory is that the less video compression that's used to make a SD DVD, the better it looks when upscaled. I also find that close-ups of faces, and other large images on screen, tend to upscale more successfully than crowd scenes, since there's less detail crammed into the frame and thus less need to discard details in making it fit on a DVD. Even some Blu-rays lose detail in long shots. The Chick Corea DVD box set Rendezvous in New York, with 9 disks each containing a single set by a different acoustic group in Chick's career, each of them less than an hour long, also looks and sounds nice - in part, I'm sure, because very little compression was needed to fit them on individual DVDs.

I've got a pre-HDMI Yamaha 5.1 receiver driving Paradigm speakers, so I snapped up a BD50 before it went unavailable, since it was the first (and only) player at the time that decoded all the lossless formats internally and output them in 5.1 via analog RCA jacks (or 7.1 via HDMI as bitstream or PCM). A newer model that had 7.1 analog outputs had been announced, but since the BD50 had been in scarce supply for half a year after its announcement and had only really become available right as its successor was announced, I didn't want to risk having to wait another half a year.

Of course, there turned out to be no wait at all for the next model, but just the same, I've never regretted getting the BD50. It has excellent sound and video quality and has never balked at any disk I've fed it, even though I waited nearly a year to do my first firmware upgrade.

I can't testify as to either of my players' comparative merits vis-a-vis the Oppos, since I've never seen an Oppo except on the web, but I'll say this: the sound quality of a concert Blu-ray's lossless audio track played by the Panasonic DMP-BD50 is as good as the sound quality of an SACD or DVD-Audio disk played by the Denon 2910.

I've got a shelf-full of SACDs and DVD-Audio disks, but I don't expect to see much more being released in those formats, given the acoustic parity of Blu-ray's lossless audio codecs - and Blu-ray's much greater market penetration, aided by the merchandising value of visuals.
 
#42 ·
Hi Fellas,

I'll add my $.02 here and some/all of my comments have been stated previously. There are many factors that come into play when trying to make this decision. For example what size screen are you going to be viewing your movies on? If it is up to about 60" or so maybe even 65" it will be almost impossible to tell a difference when watching Blu-ray movies. Of course your specific setup and your vision will play a part here. I have read reviews in the past that state even when using huge screen sizes it is just nitpicking when trying to tell the difference between picture quality for Blu-ray. From my experience I would agree with this. Remember also that you won't be running and comparing different players side by side in your home, once you have your player you will just enjoy it so even if there were some small advantage under certain circumstances it would be irrelevant. I know some may chime in saying this model tests out better for this or that, and it may be true on a test bench but can YOU see the difference in your setup?

As has been mentioned already if you are going to use the digital output then all the worry over DAC's is pointless as they don't come into play. You only need to be concerned with the DAC and other associated circuit design/components if you plan to use the analog out audio. Whether to do this or not again depends on your situation such as what quality level audio is available in your receiver/controller.

As far as watching DVD's on a Blu-ray player, in general the recent models all do a better job of de-interlacing and scaling than a standard DVD player would, with a few exceptions. There are going to be noticeable differences in performance of this aspect between players on a test bench and even if you are doing critical viewing on a large enough screen. I see differences on my 50" plasma, and even my wife and some friends have noticed a difference, and those people are not "into" home theater so it is a real difference not just something I perceive. Only you can judge this for yourself. By the way, some of the newer Pioneer av receivers use a Marvell solution for this and perform above and beyond even the best solutions offered by others. It is interesting that it seems Oppo is looking very seriously into switching to this solution for their next player(s). Keep in mind that NO solution will perform miracles if the original DVD is of poor quality, and even the best de-interlacing and scaling solution won't make even a high-quality DVD look just like a blu-ray although the picture can be more than adequate. Hope this helps.
 
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