My Yamaha dvd player is going down, replace with an Oppo?

My Yamaha DVC-6480 carousal dvd player has starting to give me trouble, giving me "wrong region" errors on some new DVD's or backups without scratches.

I was thinking about replacing it with an Oppo DV-980H unit. Lot of strong reviews/press... In my setup I have of course the 990 and an older Pioneer 533HD5 CRT TV, (Component/S/Composite/VGA video only) NO DVI NO HDMI connections.

Q1: Since the Oppo 980 player can upconvert to 1080i on component for non DeCSS dvd's, will my backups made with clonedvd & anydvd look how much % better than 480p video on my yamaha? I've seen many post where guys say "it not blu ray or HD-DVD" but is it 3% better or 30% better?

I will pick up bl-ray player once this CES 2008 players become available Panny 50 or Pioneer summer 08 model...I guess I'm waiting for the internal 1.3 decoders for 5.1 analog out to the 990.

If the opppo 1080i upconversion is really a gimmick, any suggestions other than oppo? I did not really dig into Toshiba HD-DVD players because many are saying death is coming in 08 for them........only time will tell...

any thoughts would be appreciated...

Thanks Vince

For commercial DVD's, the 980H's component output is limited to 480p, but for anything that lacks CSS copy protection the player will go ahead and upscale to whatever resolution it is set to (I'd recommend 1080i for a CRT-based display like yours).

The 980H is a nice player, certainly (I helped beta test it although it has now moved to a two-channel system ), and without DVI or HDMI on the TV it is probably the best fit for your needs of their players. It is not the most sophisticated upscaling solution around, of course (that comes at a higher price, in the form of things like the high-end Denons or OPPO's upcoming 983H, which will use a pair of Anchor Bay chips to do the scaling and deinterlacing when it shows up in the next couple months), but it is likely to still do a better job of scaling than the internal scalers in an HDTV manufactured four or more years ago (as in your case). Keep in mind, at some point along the way, the signal from a DVD is going to get converted to HD resolution somehow. If the player doesn't do it, the TV will. Some TV's include quite good scaling solutions to handle such things, but part of the reason that companies like OPPO started putting scalers in their playes was the large number of displays that didn't do a good job with scaling. Remember all the folks who got HDTV's and complained how utterly unwatchable standard TV looked afterward? Part of that was the larger screen size, but part of it was also the crummy scaling solutions being used to convert 480i to the displays' native resolutions.

Will it be 5% better than your old Yamaha, or will it be 50% better? The honest answer is "I don't know," partly because the quality of your TV's scalers are going to contribute quite a bit. I will say that you'll want to run through a calibration disc when you replace the Yamaha with anything. OPPO builds good products and has quite good customer support - like Outlaw, they are direct to the customer over the internet, so they make a point of keeping the customer at the forefront of their priorities. If you need a replacement for the Yamaha, the 980H is a strong candidate - and not solely for the video scaling capabilities.

I've had an Oppo 980 for about 2 months and love it. Definitely a difference over my old Pioneer. Sound is great. I normally use 720p because that is what my Samsung Plasma is and I think it looks best on my set. And the price is pretty good also.

The other thing that I'll say is that one reason I bought my first OPPO player (a 971H) was because the user interface on my Yamaha player (a DVD-S1500) annoyed me so badly. The OPPO's are not the most glamourous or always the most intuitive in this regard, perhaps, but I've found their players to be much friendlier than the S1500 was. Your changer is older than my S1500, I believe, so the interface may not be as odd as what I was dealing with (front panel was just big enough to show the current time with no track or chapter indicator, player configuration settings were in the same menu as disc controls, and like all Yamaha players the track skip buttons are the same as the FF/rewind buttons).

I like my Oppo 971 and would recommend an Oppo to anyone.

The only complaint that I have is the sometimes glitchy performance of its subtitle output.

However, the Oppo players are really optimized for the digital realm, so you won't get the best performance out of them using component video.

I have the Oppo HD981, which for me makes sense as I now have a 52" LCD tv with multiple HDMI inputs. This is an excellent dvd player that also handles other formats such as dvx, mp3, ogg, sacd, dvd-audio, etc.... It makes the most of dvd's upscaling to 1080p (native resolution of my tv).

Now that it looks like blu-ray will "win" the format war I hope Oppo comes out with a blu-ray machine in the future.

Kscharf mentions the 981HD, which I started to mention myself, but in light of the TV involved here it really isn't a good choice - no component output at all...
In general, that's true, but the 980H's component output should do a pretty solid job with non-CSS discs.

I reviewed my Pioneer TV manual..I could not find anywhere where is said native resolution. When I did a google search...ISF calibrator mentioned in a post that it is 1080i native. The Yamaha's DVD player output at 480p, I guess is being scaled to 1080i via component??...it looks very good, but not as good as Bright House HD cable box 1080i source of course...

Does the MX-700 remote have any issues controlling the Oppo players?

thanks for the comments.........

Vince

How old is your Pioneer TV? Is it a CRT? If so then yes it's native resolution will be 1080i.

Since gonk uses a remote from that manufacturer with his Oppos I don't think you'd have any issues controlling the Oppo with that remote.

At the very least, as long as you have the MX-700 software, you can learn the Oppo remote codes if they are not in the MX-700 database.

I did a bit of searching on your TV the other day, and somewhere I saw mention that it offered 1000 lines of resolution. HD CRT's are most often classified as 1080i displays, and yours appears to be no exception. And, yes, any source would be scaled to that resolution if it doesn't come in at that resolution. No amount of scaling of 480i sources will achieve picture quality truly equal to good HD (I qualify that because I have seen upconversion of really good DVD sources that was on par with some mediocre HD sources). On some discs, I have seen minimal differences when comparing my old S1500 (sending 480p to my 32" CRT HDTV) to an OPPO Digital 981HD (sending 1080i to the same TV), but on other discs (particularly scenes with a lot of fine detail) I can tell a difference - and on a larger display, the differences are more likely to show up.

If your player were still working fine, I'd say that you may not need to upgrade - while you can always make use of OPPO's 30-day trial policy, your display's lack of a digital video input makes it a less-than-ideal upgrade just for upgrade's sake. If the player is starting to flake out, though, the 980H is a very good candidate for replacing it.

I've controlled the 971H, 981HD, and 980H with my MX-700 without a single problem. I even have setup files for each in my MX-700 review .

Yeah it's a 5 year old 53" CRT, it was considered one of the best CRT's for SD back then...The video scaler is quite good on the old pioneers....

Gonk, like you said, if the Yamaha really craps out I can't lose with a Oppo 980 for my TV situation and as you guys have stated, the MX-700 remote will have no issue controlling it.

Thanks for the advice........
Vince