In the summer of 2005 I came across a well regarded DVI upconverting DVD player from a new kid on the block by the name of OPPO and decided to give it a whirl. This culminated in August of 2005 into a Review in Progress report for the OPDV-971HD in which I gave the product a very high rating. I have been recommending OPPO ever since.

Since then, OPPO has released another model, the DV-970HD. The DV-970HD added HDMI output, SACD and DVD Audio, analog audio with the ability to turn the video stages off for better audio reproduction, and a unique 480i output directly from the disc for the scaling videophile.

Read the Full Review

HQV Benchmark DVD
The DV-981HD has manual or auto 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios providing the ability to test the content in its native aspect ratio.

Color Bars (4:3) FAIL
Color Bars (16:9) PASS
Using the 4:3 aspect the horizontal 720 box was dramatically rolled off for luminance and the horizontal 180 box for chroma showed large banding.

Jaggie 1 (16:9) PASS

Jaggie 2 (16:9) PASS

Flag (4:3) PASS

Detail (16:9) PASS

Noise (4:3) PASS
The noise reduction feature offers three settings – low, medium and high. Without using this feature the DV-981HD has the least amount of noise in testing so far. Using high erased the noise altogether.

Motion Adaptive Noise (16:9) PASS or FAIL
Motion Adaptive Noise (4:3) PASS
As noted prior there are three levels available for noise reduction. The roller coaster sequence showed a ghostly trail behind it using the high setting and selecting medium instead removed that artifact. The second sequence of the boat moved too slow for the high setting to create a problem.

Film Detail (4:3) PASS

Assorted Cadences (16:9)
2-2 30fps film - FAIL
2-2-2-4 DVCAM - FAIL
2-3-3-2 DVCAM - FAIL
3-2-3-2-2 VARI SPEED Broadcast - FAIL
5-5 Anime - FAIL
6-4 Anime - FAIL
8-7 Anime - FAIL
3-2 24fps film - PASS

Mixed 3:2 with titles (4:3) PASS

Digital Video Essentials
Full testing is in the review taking a marginal second place to the Toshiba HD-A35

Perspective
This player did a great job with these tests overall. The 4:3 Color Bar failure was surprising and I did not test the player with native 4:3 content but the results suggest a loss in fine detail would be expected. Having a Faroudja video processor I was surprised by all the cadence failures except for 3-2fps film. I have a very nasty improperly mastered DVD for testing such things and the player handled that quite well so it is difficult to explain this with out further research.

As noted in the review:

On the other hand if you are into special features or foreign origin DVDs, much of that content for SD DVD is still letterboxed… If you are a passionate videophile then your best bet is to use an external scaler/DVD player combo.