The best upconverting available

I was in the process of upgrading our living room system and decided a high-quality DVD player was a must. I was scared off buying a true HD player since the format wars hadn't yet been resolved. (Note that they were resolved recently by Toshiba pulling the plug on HD DVD, leaving Blu-Ray as the winning format.) So the next best thing was to look for a good "up-converting" DVD player that outputs HD-like quality to your HDTV.

It didn't take long to determine that the Oppo is perfect for this application. All of the Oppo DVD players are up-converting and they all use very sophisticated hardware and software to accomplish the best resolutions possible. And they output those signals in every format you can imagine through the player's HDMI connection (cable provided, too!).

Once the player arrived, I really had to wonder if it's up to the task. This thing is so thin it's almost unbelievable. And while it's not the cheapest feeling player I've seen/felt, it doesn't give one a warm and fuzzy feeling when holding it. But it is attractive and sleek, so it goes well in just about all settings.

So connect it to your HDTV with the HDMI cable and put in your first DVD. Be prepared to be unimpressed unless you've read the manual first. You see you must manually set the output resolution before you insert the disc. And the default is 480i (standard DVD resolution) so it looks like any other DVD player. If you have a 720p HDTV, set the resolution to 720p and try again. Even better, if you have a 1080p HDTV, set it to 1080p and now put in your DVD. The difference is staggering on a properly set up TV. Watching standard resolution DVDs of Lost looks just like the HDTV broadcast.

There are also some other tweaks you can do with the player in the user settings menu. Most are straightforward and self-explanatory, but I recommend you don't play with the color and black settings too much or you may throw your HDTV's picture out of whack. Always best to rely on the TV's settings primarily.

It is worth noting that this player can also play the high-resolution audio formats SACD and DVD-Audio, so it's a true "universal player" for any format you can throw at it (except the HD-resolution DVDs HD DVD and Blu-Ray). And importantly, most of the high-res audio can be output through the HDMI connection - very rare.