Oppo Digital DV-970HD DVD Player

This is a great upconverting DVD player. I'm using it with a Samsung HLS4266W, and while the Oppo player doesn't quite eliminate 100% of the block noise & false contour errors on the TV, it's a tremendous improvement over my old Samsung player.

Don't pay attention to complaints that this player's image is vertically "compressed". These ill-informed complaints are based on the fact that very slight black bars are visible at top & bottom of the image on certain 1.85:1 aspect ratio movies (see: When Harry Met Sally, Half Baked, Knocked Up). The cause for these black bars is actually the fact that the original aspect ratio of the movie (1.85:1) is ever so slightly wider than the actual aspect ratio of the wide TV (1.78:1); the small black bars are actually part of the DVD image, and they are necessary in order to display the complete picture without distortion. This is the same princible which causes much larger black bars for movies with the 2.35:1 aspect ratio (see: Pirates of the Carribbean, O Brother Where Art Thou); it's just on a smaller scale. The reason why other DVD players may NOT show these small bars with the same titles is that they are actually cropping a few pixels at top & bottom (possibly on the sides too), and are not showing you the whole picture. So the black bars reflect a strength of the Oppo, not a shortcoming.

Speaking of shortcomings, I have only two complaints with this model. The first is occasional and very brief combing for scene changes on certain DVDs. It's not terribly distracting because it's only visible for a split second, and as it only accompanies scene changes, it doesn't disrupt an otherwise smooth image. You have to REALLY be looking for it.

The second problem is more regular combing (regular meaning more than once per second) on certain film-based DVDs with a 4:3 aspect ratio . This problem is rampant on the DVD of the TV show "Police Squad". The issue is fixable by changing the display mode on the player from wide/auto to just wide, and then putting your TV in 4:3 mode to re-squeeze the image back to its original aspect ratio. To me though, this problem merits complaint because it basically defeats the purpose of having a wide/auto mode in the first place; if you have to set the player to wide all the time, you're no longer achieving the ideal situation of having the player preform 100% of your scaling & upconversion. You're also performing unnecessary processing of the image; the player has to stretch it out only to have the TV squeeze it back down. What's more, if your TV does not have the ability to squeeze a wide image down to a 4:3 aspect ratio, you're stuck having to choose between either a stretched image or a distractingly jittery one.

Oppo knows about this issue, but as far as I know they have no plans to address it with a future firmware fix.

Overall though, great player and tremendous value; there's NOTHING in this price range with both this combination of features and video/audio quality.