Just took the Oppo plunge!
 

My Toshiba DVD player died last weekend after 8 good years. I was looking to move up to a mid-level Denon, but there are too many big-ticket items that need to be taken care of this year. With my dwindling budget, I remembered the favorable comments I'd read on the Oppo players and ordered the DV-970HD model today. I'm excited just to have a new player, let alone one that will should be able to handle my DVD-A discs as well as multi-region ones. I'm sure I'll have questions once I get it set up, so I may be bumping this thread in a few days.

You're going to love it. Oppo is a great bang-for-the-buck player.

I had still been using the second-generation Sony DVD player that I bought at the end of 1998. I had never seen the need to replace it, because it played every disc I ever put in it without fail, even ones that gave most players fits. But when I bought a Sony SXRD HDTV in February, I knew it wqas time to upgrade to an upconverting DVD player with HDMI. I bought the Oppo 981 and have been loving it ever since. SACD and DVD-A capability, DivX file playback, multi-region and no pause at the layer change. What's not to love?

I like the image quality of the Oppo, my only complaint is that the RCA audio jacks stopped working after only a few weeks of use. Customer service was helpful in trying to work it out, but it just appears that they failed. So instead of shipping it back to be repaired, I just upgraded to optical and everything is fine now. I just hope that was an isolated incident and not a lack of quality parts on their end.

If it happened under warranty, I'd still return it to Oppo for repair or replacement.

I've had the Oppo for awhile with no issues. After going though several players with issues the main reason for my purchase was customer support, it's top notch. They have addressed every issue and have consistently made upgraded firmware available. If you have a problem with it, call them you'll be surprised and even shocked with the support.

I've upgraded my remotes 3 times and all they do is charge 5 bucks shipping for as many remotes as will fit in the package.

I would re-contact Oppo. From what I gathered, they ship out a new unit, and you return yours in the same box.

Just something to consider. I cannot cooment on the RCA outputs, as I have used the digital out since I got it.

That's not what I was told. I was told that I had to ship it back at my own cost and they would repair it and send it back to me. It just seemed like a hassle that was avoided by upgrading to better cables.

Not the customer service experience I had. They sent me a replacement, and pre-paid for the shipping. You ship your old defective unit back in the box they send your new one in.

I would call, and nicely complain about the inconveniance about having to pay for shipping for a manufacturers defect. That's not normal. Tell them you know that they send out units and you send yours back in the same box for all of their customers. Tell them respectfully, that you would expect the same kind of customer support.

Oppo is great, and mzupeman2 has some great advice in terms of getting them to want to help you out.

Congrats on the Oppo.

I've been looking at the 970 and the 981 myself. Has the vertical compression on the 970 been fixed yet? Thats one thing holding me back on picking the 970.

Oppo does say on their website that on some films, in order for the upconversion to work properly with the hardware, there needs to be a very tiny black bar on the top or bottom. For me, it's been on the bottom... and it hasn't happened with all 16:9 content either. In fact, there's been quite a bit of 16:9 content that hasn't had this issue. But when there is 'vertical compression', it really doesn't make the picture look like it was squeezed in any way at all.

I have the 970 and there's the issue there you speak of, and there's a few DVD's that have every so often what appears to be a single frame skip here and there... and that's due to the encoding of the DVD's and how the Oppo reads them. Despite these couple of issues, I'm very finicky and very picky about things I pay money for that deals with DVD's, and I'm happy with the 970. The 970 you won't get those macroblocking issues. Its upconversion is great. You can take a reference DVD and it looks practically like its HD.