My 971H arrived yesterday! After quickly getting everything connected, I started pumping DVDs into the sucker. Now, less than 24 hours later, I need some guidance:

First, forgive me if this is a dumb quesiton, but I thought when playing discs at 1080i (my TV's native resolution) the display would upconvert to the point where I had a full screen HD-like picture without letterbox. However, this was not the case with some of DVDs (e.g. Master and Commander, Sexy Beast). I did get full screen display on the DVD, One Hour Photo. All of the above discs are widescreen formats. Do I have something configured wrong here?

Second, it looks like it's going to take some tweaking of my video settings to get things to look right. Granted, things were previously dialed in for the Sony DVD player the Oppo replaced. And yes, I see better detail, especially in brighter scenes, but right now I'm not exactly blown away by the picture quality. Is use of a calibration disc (like Avia) essential to maximizing performance of the player?

Lastly, anyone have any tips regarding their settings? I currently have my display set to wide and TruLife on. Apart from that, I have not played around much with the settings in Video Setup, nor am I sure what benefit or drawbacks things like CCS, Noise Reduction, etc. all bring to the table.

In response to your first questions, here's some reading material (Make sure you check out the "Widescreen-O-Rama" section):

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/index.html

Upconverting to 1080i is not related to whether or not you see bars. The above article should clarify this.

Just started flipping through the article. So it looks like anamorphic may come as letterbox or non-letterbox?

Also, I just called Oppo technical support. For starters, I assumed setting DVI to 1080i was ideal for my display type. Wrong; Oppo said to use 720P. I should have thought twice about assuming the higher interlaced setting was preferable to the lower, but progressive scan, setting.

Jason J's link is an excellent resource. Basically, though, it's a simple math problem: widescreen HDTV's are an aspect ratio shape of 16:9 (or 1.78:1). Movies are shot at typically either 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, meaning that both are wider than HDTV displays. The result is that both still need at least a little bit of letterboxing to preserve the original aspect ratio.

Thanks Gonk. I've noticed the display varies quite a bit from DVD to DVD. For example, both the anamorphic widescreen versions of "Sin City" and "One Hour Photo" (both are 1.85:1) displayed over the entire 16:9 frame without letterbox. That said, I am not confident I can tell just by looking at the specs' on the back of the DVD case that the next 1.85:1 anamorphic DVD I pop in the player will display the same way.

On a side note, my Avia calibration DVD arrived over the weekend. I used it and the THX Optimizer on "The Incredibles" to calibrate my settings for the plasma. I am pleased to report that the Oppo is really showing its full potential. The picture is just incredible.