An Affordable DVD Player for All Those HDTVs

January 18th, 2006

Our up-converting DVD player, a Toshiba, recently died. It's not very old and I can't figure out what happened to make it stop responding, so we're not getting another Toshiba.

For those who aren't familiar with up-converting DVD players, these are players that perform a conversion on the picture so that the DVDs that you watch don't look like crap on high definition televisions.

When Kathy first bought her HDTV, no one said anything about this. When we popped in the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD, I was shocked at how awful the picture looked. It was kind of like a low resolution JPG enlarged too much on a computer screen. EW. I spent forever going through all the manuals trying to figure out how to fix the picture, only to later find out that we needed a DVD player that could apply an algorithm to simulate better picture quality.

So, now that we're in the market for a new one, I decided to do some research to find out what would be our best choice. We don't want to spend a fortune on this.

DVD Player

What I found was a DVD player from a company I had never heard of: Oppo. Oppo is located in Mountain View, CA (in the Bay Area). They just make DVD players and more specifically, up-converting ones. Recently, their $199 971H was compared very favorably to a Denon machine that costs $3500. People are raving about the picture quality when you use DVI a connection.

We decided to give the Oppo a go and ordered it through Amazon.com. So far, we're impressed. Oppo appears to have exceptional customer service, something that has become unique nowadays. I'll let you know if our Oppo experience takes a turn.

Someday, our favorite movies will be available in high definition format, and then we can worry about buying yet another DVD player. In the meantime, though, the Oppo 971H appears to be exactly what we need. If you're in the market for a budget-priced DVD player, check this one out. It's available through Amazon.com and directly from Oppo.

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