The OPPO BDP-83 is a feature-packed Blu-ray Disc player that really delivers. Blu-ray playback is excellent, and utilizing Anchor Bay VRS technology, the BDP-83 also delivers excellent upscaling for standard DVD playback. Also, other features, such as Profile 2.0 compliance, SACD and DVD-Audio playback, as well as aa 2 USB ports for importing images and [...]
Oppo Digital may not be the most recognized name on the block, but if you’ve used its products in the past, you’ll certainly remember it. Oppo has been in the DVD player market for a few years now and does all of its business online. You won’t find its products stocked in your local Best [...]
Home theater enthusiasts have long dreamed of owning disc players that could handle virtually every type of material one might want to play—movies in either DVD or Blu-ray format, CDs, and even specialty audio discs in formats such as SACD, DVD-Audio and HDCD. What’s needed, of course, is a combination Blu-ray/universal player, but building one [...]
As any good home theater enthusiast knows, the proper calibration of your display is the key step in achieving presentation quality that will knock your socks off. If, like most people however, you’re reluctant to invest in a professional ISF calibration of your equipment, then a do-it-yourself calibration disc is exactly what you need. For [...]
Home theater gearheads who frequent the AVSForum boards are no doubt already familiar with the names Spears and Munsil. For the benefit of everyone else, Stacey Spears and Don Munsil are former writers for the Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity web site who developed the DVD Benchmark and the Progressive Scan DVD Player [...]
I had never been happy with the black levels on my Samsung display, but the Spears & Munsil PLUGE and Contrast patterns allowed me to set a much better black level so that images on my display now have more depth and look more dynamic than ever before. The patterns on the other discs only [...]
A good test disc that features useful video test patterns is something I always recommend even for the video neophyte, as most HDTV owners can’t or won’t pop for a full in-home calibration. With rare exception, just about any HDTV’s out-of-the-box default video settings virtually guarantee an overly bright, harsh picture, with excessively garish colors [...]
You just shelled out big bucks for that new HDTV or video projector. It looked great at the dealer, but how do you know if you got your money’s worth in terms of real-world performance. Also, is that high-tech Blu-ray Disc player you have really up to snuff? What about that expensive video scaler/processor you [...]
With the ever-increasing number of AV sources using HDMI to output high definition video and advanced audio formats, quality switching of multiple HDMI sources to a single output has become very important. Many of the new receivers and preamps provide such switching, but in many cases only the higher end models have more than a [...]
Oppo’s HM-31 is what I like to call “full featured.” What’s full featured to an HDMI switch? How ’bout it does everything you expect it to plus some? How ’bout it has every custom integration option you’ll ever need? How ’bout it looks so nice that you’ll want to upgrade the components sitting near it? [...]
