Oppo DV-971HD DVD Player Review

Summary

The Oppo DV-971HD upconverting DVD player is a most impressive DVD player with stunning picture quality backed by a top notch electronics company.

Oppo shines

Oppo is perhaps the most responsive electronics manufacturer around with first class support that provides timely responses. I have emailed them numerous times and have always received a helpful and quick answer. Also, Oppo seems committed to the customer, imagine that. For instance, The DV-971HD does not support discrete power IR commands. I emailed them regarding this and they tried but failed (due to hardware limitations) to add support for them to the DV-971HD via a firmware upgrade. Although they were unable to add them to the DV-971HD they added this feature to each of their follow up products (eg. DV-981HD). In addition, after 1 1/2 years of heavy use (and perhaps some abuse by my kids) some of the buttons on the unit became unresponsive. I emailed Oppo regarding the warranty and they sent me a paid shipping label to send the unit back to them, fixed it and then returned the working unit back to me... all at no cost to me.

Discrete power commands explained

Typically, devices such as DVD players, TVs, stereo components, etc have a power toggle button on their remote control. Under most circumstances this is acceptable. If the unit it off, and you press the power button then the unit is powered on and vice- versa. However, when used with a smart state remote control (such as a Harmony) devices behave best if they understand discrete power commands. That is rather than understanding only a toggle command they can distinguish between the discrete (and explicit) power on and power off IR commands.

Although many remote controls do not have 2 power buttons the corresponding component sometimes can understand the discrete power commands in addition to the toggle. If you use a remote control that keeps track of the state of components, it's important for them to understand discrete power commands because if the remote control thinks a component is off when it's true state is on, then when the smart remote control turns on the component it will be turned off, which is undesirable. This is most important in devices that are often powered on independently of the remote control such as any device that requires the insertion of media (eg. DVD and CD players). For instance, if the DVD player is off and the remote control thinks it's off and then a person presses the eject button to load a movie, the player is now on. If the person then presses the "watch movie" (or equivalent macro) button on their remote control the unit would likely be powered off since it believes the unit is still off despite the user manually powering it on.

The Oppo DV-971HD delivers incredible visual playback quality via DVI or component output and can flawlessly upconvert the 480p DVD format standard to 720p and 1080i. If you have a newer 1080p capable TV then you should take a look at Oppo's DV-981HD DVD player (which also boasts HDMI output rather than DVI). In addition, the DV-971HD supports digital audio ouput for 5.1 playback. The DV-971HD can play the following media formats:

Supported media formats
DVD Video	DVD Audio
DivX	XviD
Audio CD	HDCD
WMA	DVD+R/RW
DVD-R/RW	CD-R/RW
Kodak Picture

The verdict

Despite the lack of discrete power, the Oppo DV-971HD is an outstanding product worthy of a 9 out of 10 (I'd give it a 10 if it had the discrete power option). As for Oppo themselves, I'd rate them a solid 10 and would definitely purchase another component from them in the future.

This review is copyright Phil Schwartz
January 2007.

Return to Product Reviews
Return to The home page of Phil Schwartz