Yeah, it's definitely looking like a good maneuver on OPPO's part to put this prototype in ABT's booth this week. They've been keeping things very quiet up to now (understandably, as high expectations and excessive impatience can really put a damper on even a good product), but they seem close enough now (largely finalized hardware plus work in progress on the firmware) that it's smart marketing to get the word out to that substantial portion of their customer base that reads forums and home theater sites. I doubt that Panasonic, Sony, or Pioneer will be able to identify the drop in Blu-ray player sales that this announcement is likely to create, but there will be a drop and there will be a respectable number of people who will postpone Blu-ray hardware purchases specifically for the BDP-83 because of this prototype's appearance.

What I like most is the potential for this to be the player that gives us a real, justifiable, and practical upgrade solution for people who don't want to spend money on a new processor. I know more than one person with a 990 who has no interest in moving to a next-generation product (and even a few 950 owners in the same boat, for that matter).

Right, it certainly makes it so there isn't an absolute must to upgrade in order to take advantage of high def audio. HDMI to my TV and 7.1 analog to the 990.

Gonk - would you run analog into the 990 strait through or would you process with Dolby Pro Logic IIx for those disc's that don't have 7.1, which is the majority?

I've heard that Oppo is going to try get these units ready for the holiday season. It would be great if they could.

You've got to run straight through the 990 without additional surround processing, as the 990 can't apply PLIIx to a multichannel analog source. What remains to be seen is what options might exist internal to the player to provide matrix processing to expand 5.1 sources to 7.1. The 980H and 983H offer this ability in the form of a simply steering logic, and it would make sense for them to allow something similar in the BDP-83.

I didn't realize that, but I guess you wouldn't want to reprocess the audio anyway. I haven't been using the 980H with multi-analog out. Perhaps I'll set-it-up today and see how I like it.

Since we've bought our PS3, we haven't been watching many DVD's, it's been all blu-ray.

With the 980H and DVD's, there's no real need to use the multichannel analogs. The 7.1 direct is useful if you have any DVDA or SACD titles, in which case using the "7.1Ch" sownmix setting will enable the rear channel steering.

I do have DVDA and may see how it sounds.

I guess this will serve as a bump. Here are a couple of links that I have run into. There may be some new pictures that you haven't seen, or you may be tired of seeing these. Like i said, *bump*
- CrunchGear

- Home Cinema Choice (mentions a possible $700 price for the player)

- YouTube video from Cedia showing the Oppo at 5 min. into the video

I can't tell; will this new OPPO decode the new lossless formats when it is released or will that feature be a firmware update at a later time?

We don't know. My suspicion is that it will decode them when it launches, but we've had no official word either way - just that the hardware supports it but the firmware they had running on it when it was shown (staticly) at CEDIA didn't yet implement those capabilities.

The picture of the back of the Oppo confirms that it will decode all of the formats.
Even if it was missing anything after it's release you know that Oppo would have a firmware update that would take care of it anyway.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=14603715#post14603715