Now I'm waiting for a BDP-83. I was inclined to wait an see what the new, lower cost, product would be, but Gonk made me pull the trigger when he said that the new one would be the 980H with BluRay support.
I liked the 980, but it was not as good as the 981 which was not as good as 983. This with regard to video performance.
We're still theorizing, of course - OPPO has provided that example to a couple people, but we don't know how the video performance will stack up. The new player certainly won't be using the same Mediatek chip that drove the 980H (since it isn't BD-compatible), but will instead presumably be using the Mediatek chip found in the BDP-83. I doubt that it will perform worse than the 980H for DVD upscaling, but there's no way yet to know if it will perform better. That being said, it would seem reasonable to say that a 980H-style BD player will not be equal to the BDP-83's ABT2010 video processor...
I'm not that interested in the audio performance of the DBP-83 for I have a dedicated music system based on Dell/Benchmark/Musical Fidelity separates.
I can say that the 990, which I'm using only for HT, has fine DAC's inside and a good analog stage, but doesn't match up with the Benchmark/Musical Fidelity combo, not that it should, considering the difference in price and market segment.
So I can definitely say that DAC's and analog stages make a word of difference.
Of course, that's only my opinion...
You may be more interested in the audio performance than you realize. For lossless audio from Blu-ray (as with SACD and DVD-Audio), you will need to rely on the multichannel analog output. I doubt that it will be the equal of a Benchmark/Music Fidelity combo (that's a lot of oomph dedicated solely to stereo D/A conversion), but it
will compare well with the 990 when you need it for multichannel discs.
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