BDP-83 Product Comparison and Setup

Up until now we've been heavily recommending the Playstation 3 gaming system for use as a Blu-ray player due to its decent deinterlacing and the fact that up until this year it was one of the only Profile 2.0 players on the market. While we've backed off lately due to advances in competing products, and some advancements that surpass the capabilities of even the PS3 as a Blu-ray player, the real question remains - which is the best player for your purposes? To help you decide, we put forth this chart to lay out the differences between the PS3 and the Oppo BDP-83 player:

In terms of universality, the PS3 can't compete. For use as a standalone Blu-ray player, it's still a contender and offers much of the same level of performance unless you need analogue audio outputs, RS-232C control or, say… IR control. Both players did mediocre on standard definition noise reduction, though I don't see this as much of an issue with Blu-ray Disc playback.

Player Set-Up & Use

The new Oppo BDP-83 menu system is refreshing and easy to navigate. It is broken down into 6 Setup subsections: Playback, Video, Audio Format, Audio Processing, Device, and Network. Playback sets the priority for DVD-Audio and SACD discs and the defaults are set correctly for most multi-channel disc users. The Video Setup menu gives you picture controls like Noise Reduction but also control 24p playback for 1080p content as well as DVD content. The player seems fully capable of working with 2:2 (or higher) systems that change the playback frequency to avoid judder effects in film-sourced content. For the 7.1-channel analogue audio outputs, Oppo has really beefed up its bass management system, providing not only a graphical user interface, but also options for setting distance (delay), size and level control for each channel. This is a far cry from Oppo's earlier attempts at minimal bass management. You can also set the downmix options, which provides 5.1 for those not using a 7.1 speaker system.

Let's talk load times. Hit the Eject button and the player takes 3 seconds to wake up and open the tray. 16 seconds later you are playing your disc. That is performance that exceeds any other player we've tested to-date. This is an exciting new player that, sad to say, finally takes Blu-ray back to the speed and quickness of DVD players we're all used to manhandling.