A few points to keep in mind.
Oppo makes three players currently. The 980, the 981, and the current flagship - the 983. The 980 uses Mediatek scaling engine. The 981 uses Faroudja Video Processing for upconversion and upscaling. The 983 uses VRS by Anchor Bay a completely different chip set for video processing.
The best amongst these for video processing is, of course, the 983. The 980 and 983 play music well, while the 981 does not have the same circuitry for music. Oppo is going to stop production and distribution of the 983 very shortly and replace it with their BD Player that has all the features of the 983 and additional features for Blu-Ray processing,
Given Oppo's current pricing in India, the BD player may well cost between 45,000 to 50,000. At that price it may not be worth it at all.
I find the Pioneer 610 to be an excellent player also. It uses the Mediatek 1389 family of DVD SOC chips which, according to MediaTek, incorporates advanced features such as MPEG-4 vid.eo decoder, high quality TV encoder, USB, card reader, and state-of-the-art de-interlace processing. Some of specs are:
- 192 kHz/24-bit D/A Converter
- Built-in Dolby Digital and DTS Decoder (5.1 channel)
- Total Harmonic Distortion 0,0023 %
- Frequency Response 4 - 44 Hz
- Signal-to-Noise Ratio 115 dB
- Dynamic Range 100 dB
Cheers
