My first Oppo player was the 971H and although it does have a good picture, I’ve pretty much had nothing but trouble with it. Because my projector doesn’t suffer from overscan, the DVI size issues (borders around the image) made the player pretty much useless. That’s been a problem since the player’s inception, yet Oppo has still not fixed it.
Since I still needed a good, upconverting, all-region player, I decided to give Oppo another shot and get the 970HD. Allow me to break my experience down for you.
Component Problems:
Out of the box, I downloaded and applied the newest firmware (via ISO). I then applied the firmware hack to allow upconversion via component (one of the main reason I bought this model). I popped in a DVD to test the component output, but the picture seemed stretched. I called Oppo and they said it was a "vertical compression error." They sent me yet another ISO, but informed me that this wouldn’t fully fix the problem. So, even with the fix (that did help), the component inputs were always going to be a bit off.
Subtitle Problems:
One of the reasons people buy Oppo is for the region-free play. Given that, you’d think they would check to make sure the player could handle subtitles.
I put in my Region 2 copy of Pan’s Labyrinth and noticed that only part of the subtitles were being displayed. For example, instead of displaying "What is this place?" it would only display "What is."
I, again, called Oppo and the tech said that I should change the subtitle font to make them smaller. That didn’t work, so I called again. This time they informed me that because of some chip in the player that regulates the "external subtitle display area," some subtitles would be either garbled or display incorrectly. And, of course, there is no fix for this.
So, needless to say, my Oppo 970HD is on its way back to Amazon and I’m officially done with this brand.
