Posted by Bill's News on 10/31/12 11:54

Bill's News wrote:
> Alpha wrote:

<snip>

> I'm not expecting the OPPO to surpass playback quality from
> the
> PC, only to surpass that of the Buffalo LT which was
> disappointing in comparison. Not to mention that neither the
> Motorola nor the Buffalo resizes letterbox to 1920x1080 - an
> irritation that may color other perceptions ;-0)

Just arrived, 5 days ahead of Amazon's estimated arrival date.

with DVI set to 1080i

the first thing i compared was an xvid file converted from an
MPEG2 capture via S-Video of a 1.8 letterbox digital channel,
frame size 704x400, bit rate 2.192 mbps, converted with average
motion scanning. I chose this because i had a copy on DVD and
on the PC so I could toggle between them as they played the same
scenes. The OPPO produces a perceptibly better image, I'd say
as much as 10% better if I can adequately assign a value? And
the PC outputs at 1080p.

Next a DVD which is also letterbox at 2:35 appeared better than
the PC by a about the same value. This is further supported by
zooming the image to 1.8 in which case the image quality was
pretty much undisturbed on the OPPO while this is not the case
on the PC.

In addition to the improved picture quality the OPPO player's
scaling strategy is considerably smarter than the Buffalo LT, in
that letterbox 640x480 is properly displayed on a 1920x1080
display AND zooming works properly in addition. Another nice
feature of the zoom is that fast-forward or chapter navigation
does not reset it, rather the setting remains and speeded play
appears in the zoomed state. I haven't tested layer change yet,
which always caused the Buffalo to reset.

OPPO's Xvid fast forward is superb compared when with the PC and
especially with the Buffalo. One difference between OPPO and
Buffalo is that the OPPO reads navigation data when loading the
file, the Buffalo only at first navigation request - however the
OPPO's data collection is much quicker than the Buffalo giving
it two thumbs up.

The OPPO is definitely a keeper

BTW, setting DVI to each of 540, 720, and 1080 produces a
perceptible quality change here on a 1920x1080p monitor.
Matching the native resolution is the only way to go with this
pairing.

The next time one of the HD movie channels presents a film which
I have on DVD I'll compare them. I've always had the feeling
that cable channel HD movies are just DVD quality scaled up. I
suppose, if that's true, that it will change now that HD
mastering for BR & HD DVD has started?

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