I got my Oppo Dv-980H a few days ago and I'm scratching my head like never before. But let's go a bit in the past.

After I got my Samsung LN-S4095D (40" 1080p) in February, a friend of mine brought his Oppo 981H for a demo and mostly to give me some taste of 1080P (Comcast needed 1 week to install HD, given the fact that I was getting the "triple play" and Verizon was slow in surrendering the phone number).

I was NOT impressed with the Oppo, as my aging Onkyo DV-S535 was giving it a good beating. My aging Onkyo was having only an "enhanced black" option that was blowing Oppo out of the water (definitely this was also stating that the Samsung was also doing a great job upscaling and deinterlacing the 480i coming out of Onkyo). In fact, that's how my friend found out that there was that "green bug" issue with Oppo and installed the fix after comparing his Oppo with my Onkyo.

After the bug fix, Oppo performed better, but still not as well as Onkyo. Consequently, I decided to keep my Onkyo and not go for an upgrade.

But when the 980H came along, I started to itch again, mostly because the Onkyo wasn't accepting any other format but DVD and CD. Not DVD-R, nothing.

I gave Oppo 980H a chance and I found out why I didn't like the "poor" Oppo 981 initially...

In my case, for my TV and my cables, the analog component connection is far superior to HDMI. And I have "el cheapo", $15 3' component video cables.

The picture is vivid, inky and overall superb over component and relatively washed-out and noisy over HDMI. And I couldn't compensate via the TV's controls what was missing...

I compared 480p signal coming out of Oppo via component vs. via HDMI, to keep things equal (Oppo doesn't send out more than 480p over analog connection). Component was superior on all fronts.

My Motorola cable box gave me the same "behavior". 1080i over component looks better than 1080i over HDMI.

Now I have my TV, which has a plethora of inputs, connected to the Oppo via component and HDMI and the same for the cable box. Comparing is as simple as switching the input sources on my TV.

Each and every time, regardless whether the source is Oppo or the cable box, analog component beats HDMI in my system.

What could be the explanation?

The HDMI cables are relatively short, 6'. One of them is the freebie which came with the Oppo, whereas the other one is a bit more "upscale".

With a power conditioner in the system, the difference between component and HDMI when the source is the cable box narrows, but component still has the edge.

At this time I'm "all component", connection-wise and the Oppo is no more than a deinterlacer, outputting 480p. I still like it a lot and I'll keep it though, only it's a shame not to use its upscaling capability which should be better than what the TV set offers.

Any ideas? Anyone else in the same situation where analog component is superior to HDMI even over modest runs of 6'?