My Oppo 1080p DVD player and Projector People rock!

I have been a bit slow to blog about it, but I bought a new DVD player to go with the new TV. I knew the old Craptacular unit was just not gonna mate well with my 1080p beauty.

I had heard good things about upscaling DVD players, so I headed over to the AVS forums to figure out the geeks opinion. The strong consensus was "Just by an Oppo unit and shut up". OK. If it is good enough that the AVS geeks don't argue about, why should I ?

Oppo is a little niche manufacturer from the Silicon Valley. They have three models to choose from. I picked the new DV-981HD model, since it is the one that scales to 1080p.

To actually *buy* one was a bit of a challenge. Amazon claimed to sell them, but were out of stock. I eventually found Projector People.

Projector People is awesome! They have excellent customer service. A guy called me to manually verify my order and even chatted about the product, how I was going to use it, etc. I promptly got a tracking number and when it arrived the unit was very nicely packaged, came with an HDMI cable, etc. Then Projector People called me a few days after delivery to make sure I got the unit, I was able to set it up OK, and that I was happy with how it worked. I have never experienced that before when ordering stuff online.

We did some subjective eyeball testing of the Oppo vs. the Craptacular. When viewing the same scene, the difference is quite apparent. What I really like is I can burn a DVD of content from my PC and the Oppo plays it just fine. Basically if you are going to spend a bunch of money on a fancy new TV, you may as well shell out another $250 for a kick ass DVD player.

What are other people doing when they get a big flat panel ?

Seven years of DVD

I happened to be looking at my Amazon order history today and noticed that November 12, 1999 was when I bought my first DVD player. It was a Toshiba SD-2109. And yes, I was a bit late to the DVD party.

My first DVD purchase was Criterion Collection edition of Brazil.

I didn't join Netflix until August of 2000. My first Netflix rental was The Lair of the White Worm. Don't laugh. I still like this movie. I have since rented 620 discs from Netflix, which is only about two discs a week.

I am pretty passionate about Netflix kicking ass. I really hate it on the odd occasion that I find myself in a video store. Especially if it is a Blockbuster. The one exception is Videotheque in South Pasandea. I often find they have stuff even Netflix doesn't have or ideas for things to put into my Netflix queue.