Thursday, May 15, 2014

The OPPO 103D Equals AV Bliss

After seeing a few convincing demos and reading some great reviews, I decided to pull the trigger on an OPPO103D.  The OPPO BD players are in my opinion world class players and the models with D in their name are even better.  The D stands for Darbee.  

Un-boxing
These units are extremely well packed.
If it is heavy it is usually expensive, put it down...
Once installed in the rack, the OPPO 103D is easy to set up.  The menus have so many options but they are well laid out and easy to configure.  This player also has HDMI and USB inputs, so it is essentially a Home Theatre PC in a box that is mush easier to use.  The outputs are plentiful and with dual HDMI outs, I don't have to upgrade my HDMI 1.3 spec AVR when I upgrade the projector to a 3D unit.   

The OPPO 103D is fast with load times on films like Star Wars being around 15 secs (instead 2 minutes on my last player) and fully loaded with features.  Apart from excellent BD play back, the OPPO103D also playes DVD-V [at 24fps], DVD-A [lossless over HDMI], SACD [also lossless over HDMI], HDCD [built in decoder for 20BIT] and of course standard 16BIT CD.  

On the video side, the OPPO103D has a Darbee video processor built in.  The Darbee processing does make a huge difference to the image quality without the ringing of traditional sharpness controls.

Each OPPO comes with a WiFi adapter so you can connect to the net and get the full use of BD and the latest FW upgrades.  It also features APPS for Pandora Netflix etc.  I was quite impressed with the way it streamed YouTube videos.  

Picture 10/10
Sound 10/10
Functionality 10/10

Truly worth the price.

Mark