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Posted by Doug Jacobs on 02/15/07 19:08
Based on reviews and reccomendations, I went ahead and ordered Oppo's
DV-981 1080p upscaling player.
It arrived earlier this week, was quickly connected, and looks awesome.
However, DVDs on our Panasonic VCR/DVD-burner also look awesome.
I'm not disappointed with the Oppo - we needed a new region free player
as my old hacked Sony has begun having problems and won't play some of my
wife's discs at all. The Panasonic has no region-free hack that I could
find.
I am, however, curious what titles might better illustrate the difference
between the Panasonic which does standard progressive scan, and the Oppo
which upscales to 1080p (TV is 1080p native)
Best test I came up with was to slap a Babylon5 disc into each player and
had them play the opening credits. This sequence contains a variety of
still shots and rapid movements of both real actors and CG elements. In the
opening, there's a CG shot showing some soliders marching into a ship. On
the Panasonic, the soliders were blurry. You could still tell there were
people but the whole line of them was rather blurry. The Oppo was much
clearer, though there was still some distortion around the soliders' limbs.
The next test I tried was using our region 5 copy of Spirited Away. The
Panasonic player wouldn't play this of course, so I played various scenes
on the Oppo at 480p and then 1080p. To me, 1080p looked sharper, but of
course, I'm going to be biased. ;)
Any other ideas of good titles/scenes to try out?
I was thinking Fifth Element, simply because that was one of the early
titles I saw on DVD that convinced me to get a DVD player in the first
place.
In the meantime, I think I'll dig up some Divx and VCD discs and try them
out.
Now I just have to save up money for a better sound system :(
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