Well, OPPO has been telling folks to expect the DV-983H by the end of March. That will be something of a statement piece for them regarding standard DVD players. They've been very tight-lipped about what will come after that, but in light of the difficulties seen with LG and Samsung combo players I'm starting to suspect that their first shot at an HD player will be Blu-ray only rather than combo.

Every Blu-ray player supports DVD playback, including upscaling via the HDMI output. Like the HD-DVD players, the quality of that upscaling will vary from player to player, but DVD support in Blu-ray players has never been an issue. Ain't It Cool was the first place I ever saw that suggested otherwise when they had ran an article coming out in favor of HD-DVD. While HD-DVD certainly does a good job delivering HD content, that article was far from being an accurate description of the format war - it included a lengthy discussion of how convenient it was that HD-DVD players would play DVD's, how cool it was that it would upscale those DVD's, and why that was a benefit over Blu-ray. The truth is that my HD-A2 is a decent upscaling player (not as good as my 981HD, closer to my 980H, and not much different than my Panasonic BD30) with a sluggish interface and slow layer changes. The XA2 uses a Reon chip for upscaling DVD, which is a very good video processor, but it still has the same interface and layer change limitations of my A2.

What would I like from an OPPO Blu-ray player? I'd love to see them be able to retain some of the typical OPPO features (interface speed, layer change speed, and DVD-A and SACD support interest me, while others would be interested in PAL support and region-free operation) and combine that with good Blu-ray support (especially if it went profile 2.0). The end of the format ware will likely make it easier for them to move forward with a design, but I will be surprised if they can get an HD player out before 2009.