CUSTOM INSTALLATION HOW-TO

The Short Form

Price $230 / oppodigital.com / 650-961-1118

Snapshot

It's not real high-def, but Oppo's upconverting DVD player puts out a solid 1080p picture - plus it sounds great.

Plus

•Clean 1080p upconversion of regular DVDs •Plays a wide range of multimedia file formats and disc types, including DVD-Audio and SACD •Flexible, wide-ranging audio and video setup options

Minus

•Cluttered remote control •Somewhat flimsy disc tray •No component-video output

Key Features

•Upconverts regular DVDs to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p HDTV format •Plays DVDs, audio CDs, DVD-Audio discs, Super Audio CDs, HDCDs, Kodak Picture CDs, and discs with DivX video and Windows Media Audio files •Six-channel analog audio output •Comes with 2-meter HDMI cable •Outputs HDMI, composite-video, and S-video; optical and coaxial digital audio, 6-channel analog audio, and stereo analog audio •16.5 x 10.5 x 1.5 in; 5.3 lb

PERFORMANCE To be honest, the thing that most excited me about the DV-981HD was its ability to play both of the high-rez audio disc formats, so that's the area I dug into first. When I listened to a multichannel DVD-Audio mix of "Old Man" from Neil Young's Harvest album, the Oppo's sound was lush, open, and detailed. Even the banjos packed into the surround channels on this song didn't spoil the vivid sense of sonic immersion the disc delivered. To my ears, high frequencies sounded a bit more extended when listening via the player's analog outputs, but PCM playback over HDMI was also very satisfying.

Before diving into the Oppo's video performance, I'll repeat what I said up front: DVDs digitally upconverted to high-def don't look anywhere near as crisp and clean as the real thing on HD DVD and Blu-ray. Having got that out of the way, let me say that movies bumped up to 1080p by the Oppo looked as good if not better than on other upconverting DVD players I've handled in the past, and its picture also held up very well when compared to that from my Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player. That model offers high-quality DVD upconversion, but its resolution maxes out at 1080i, leaving it up to the TV to complete the final deinterlacing step to create a 1080p picture. (Toshiba's new second-generation HD-XA2 HD DVD player, which we reported on in our May issue, also does full 1080p upconversion.)

With the DV-981HD, you won't have to worry about jaggies or other deinterlacing-related artifacts, because the player delivers a consistently solid-looking picture. When I checked it out on the suite of tests contained on the Silicon Optix HQV test DVD, the Oppo passed every one except a motion-adaptive noise test with the player's noise reduction set to either medium or high - a situation that the player's manual warns about! It also proved capable of passing below-black signals on test patterns from the Avia Pro DVD and displayed zero pixel cropping on another test from the same disc.

What ultimately matters most, of course, is how a player performs with movies, and here the Oppo held up extremely well. When I watched a scene from The Interpreter where Tobin Keller (Sean Penn) and Dot Woods (Catherine Keener) converse with a U.N. honcho, I could make out a wealth of detail in the utilitarian office environment. A large, bright red phone on a nearby desk also looked impressively clean, with no visible sign of softness or streaking.

BOTTOM LINE With HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc continuing to battle for the title of sole next-generation video format, alternatives such as the Oppo DV-981HD upconverting DVD player are an excellent option for HDTV owners who, either through a shortage of cash or an excess of good sense, prefer to wait things out on the sidelines. The DV-981HD provided consistently solid-looking 1080p pictures, as well as fine-sounding audio from DVDs, DVD-Audio discs, SACDs, and regular CDs. When you add in the player's ability to handle additional disc and multimedia file formats such as Picture CDs and DivX, it totals up to a pretty great deal.

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