QUICK PICK REVIEW: DECEMBER 20, 2007
Oppo DV-980H Upscaling DVD Player
OPPO’s DV-980H fills out a line of upscaling DVD players that represent outstanding value and performance.
Regular readers of this site know how highly I think of OPPO’s upscaling DVD players. While the brand doesn’t have the mainstream recognition of companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Pioneer, OPPO’s red laser DVD players give up nothing in terms of performance to “the big guys.”
The DV-980H came out a couple of months back and I recently gave it a thorough workout. It fills in a gap in OPPO’s product line, in that it brings back the component video outputs missing from the DV-981H and restores 480i output through the HDMI connector, something it shares with the DV-970H.
As with other OPPO players, the DV-980H supports pretty much any and every optical red laser disc format, from DVD-Video to DVD±R/RW, DVD-R DL, CD-R/RW, DVDE-Audio, SACD, HDCD, Kodak Picture CD, and DivX V2.2 (DivX 6 compatible).
APPEARANCE AND CONNECTORS
Figure 1. OPPO’s DV-980H looks a lot like a current generation blue laser player.
OPPO has gone with a black and dark gray finish for the DV-980H and retains the low, high-tech profile of previous players. The front panel now has a vertical row of blue LEDs that indicate what output resolution you’ve selected (480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p).
To the right of the DVD tray, you’ll find a blue LED alphanumeric display that shows DVD playing status, along with chapter numbers. A navigation disc sits to the right of that display, and a silver button marked “HDMI” is used to toggle between the five different output resolutions.
The rear panel connector panel consists of composite, S-video, and component YPbPr outputs, plus an HDMI 1.2 jack. You’ll also find two SPDIF digital audio outputs — one coaxial, and one Toslink optical. OPPO has also provided individual analog audio outputs for 5.1 and 7.1 channel surround mixes.
The supplied remote control is a departure from previous designs with its black and dark gray finish. It still has too many buttons for my liking that are similar in size. The remote still isn’t backlit, although it does use “glow in the dark” translucent buttons. Still, it will take a little while to get used to navigating through menus and operating the player with this remote.
Figure 2. You’ll have both component video and HDMI connections to choose from,
although you can only upscale through the HDMI jack.
OPERATION AND MENUS
OPPO gives you plenty of adjustments to optimize DVD playback. In the general setup page, you can choose between four different aspect ratios, turn a screen saver on/off, set an LED dimmer control for the front panel indicators, and select the DVD audio mode (DVD Audio or SACD).
The Speaker set-up menu lets you choose the type of audio down mix, pick large or small speakers for all surround channels, and set channel delay between speakers for larger rooms. In the Audio menu, you can pre-equalize from seven different choices (or leave pre-EQ off), choose from seven different sound fields, toggle between Raw and PCM digital audio output, and enable LPCM audio through HDMI or automatically pass through Dolby Digital and DTS formats.
The DV-908H’s Video menu lets you fiddle with contrast, brightness, color saturation, color hue, and image sharpness. There’s also a three-position gamma setting, but if you plan to use an external home theater projector with this player, I’d leave this off and make gamma corrections downstream.
You can also switch between three different color spaces — RGB 4:4:4, YCbCr 4:4:4, and YCbCr 4:2:2. The DV-980H will select the correct space based on how the video content is encoded on the disk, but you may encounter custom DVDs that use different color spaces and this menu setting will get you into the right color universe.
I mentioned earlier that both component video and HDMI outputs are included on this player. That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to upscale DVDs through the component outputs, as commercially produced DVDs with movies and TV programs generally do not allow anything other than 480i or 480p playback through component video jacks. You can, however, scale your own DVDs through these outputs.
PERFORMANCE
The best way to see what the DV-980 is capable of is to connect it to a projector equipped with its own high-performance video processor. I used Mitsubishi’s HC6000 3LCD home theater projector, which comes equipped with Silicon Optix’ Reon processor, and analyzed several test images from the Realta HQV DVD.
For these tests, I compared the image quality of 480i video direct from the player through the Reon scaler with 1080p output from the DV-980H, bypassing the Reon chip altogether. First off, there was a difference in the quality of de-interlacing between the player and projector, as evidenced by the two “jaggies” tests on the Realta HQV disk.
Feeding the video direct as 480i to the projector resulted in the cleanest bars with minimal aliased edges. Selecting 480p output and letting the projector scale wasn’t quite as clean, but still acceptable. Switching to 1080p output resulted in a small increase in scan line artifacts that were more noticeable on the second “jaggies” pattern, particularly if you stood closer to the screen.
The waving flag sequence showed about equal results for scan line artifacts with both processors doing the clean-up work. The film mode sequence (Super Speedway) showed that both the DV-908H and the Reon processor picked up on 3:2 sequences at the same speed, which is about ½ a second (15 frames of video).
The projector/Reon combination did a much better job at detecting and correcting for oddball video/film cadences like 2:2:2:4 and 3:2:3:2:2 VariSpeed, but it’s not likely you’ll run into these very often unless you watch a lot of movies on network TV where VariSpeed is often used to compress playback time.
The combination of video title crawls over film content produced equal results between the DV-908H and the Reon processor. If anything, the DV-980H scaled output (480p, 720p, and 1080p) had slightly jagged edges present on the crawling text, but these were very slight.
An excellent DVD to use in a comparison is Mission Impossible III, particularly Chapters 6 and 7 where the team sets up a kidnapping of bad guy Philip Seymour Hoffman at the Vatican. Chapter 6 opens with a wide dolly shot of steps leading into the reception hall, and you’ll see plenty of moiré patterns on the stairs as the camera cranes down.
Neither the Reon processor nor the DV-908H could get rid of this moiré completely. In fact, the only way I’ve been able to eliminate it is to view the scene on HD DVD! But both the player and the projector were able to process the motion smoothly through this crane move.
The shots underground also provide a good test of dynamic range and low-level shadow detail, which was about equal from both players. Note the textures in the life mask of Hoffman that Ving Rhames is preparing for Tom Cruise to wear, such as skin, eyebrows, and wrinkles. It was a toss-up between the DV-980H and the Reon processor as to who did the better job.
CONCLUSIONS
OPPO’s DV-980H nicely plugs the hole that was present in their DVD player line-up. Based on my observations, its internal video processor (Mediatek) outperforms most of the scalers in consumer HDTV sets by a wide margin and holds its own against higher-end processors found in home theater projectors and monitors, all at a price that’s more than reasonable.
