Received it late yesterday.
It came packed very nicely and was easy to hook up to get started. The player is actually slimmer and has less depth than the Toshiba HD-A35. The initial boot time was about the same as the Denon, like 10 seconds or so. The set-up menu was mostly configured correctly. I just changed
TV Display to 16:9 Wide/Auto and
Color Space to YCbCr 4:2:2. I did notice some lag between commands if I got too anxious with button pressing. Also annoying was having to stop the disc everytime I wanted to enter Set-up or change the resolution, these two options are available during playback with the Denon.
It produces a 720p picture that immediately looks superior to my Denon, Toshiba, or PS3. The picture is very "solid" with no artificial color bias. Clarity and sharpness is also there as much as DVD can muster. To the point I caught myself looking at certain things on-screen and forget the movie. I did notice a bit of digital noise in backgrounds at times (w/ Diary of the Dead), but this is just DVD after all and I haven't used any test patterns yet to get Contrast/Brightness correct. I also need to watch some more interlaced stuff since the player is known to be so-so with that material.
A pleasant surprise was HDMI audio pass-through actually working. No matter how I set up the Denon it just wouldn't pass Dolby and DTS to my receiver via HDMI, only multi-channel PCM. With the Oppo I just set the HDMI Audio option to Auto and I had Dolby and DTS from the receiver.
The PAL picture quality was good on the pre-loaded firmware, but I noticed some shimmering lines with camera movement on a few discs. I updated the player to Oppo's Beta firmware (via USB, very easy and took no time) and afterward the same discs exhibited no shimmering. Very excellent.
I haven't tried out any DVD-A or SACDs and haven't played around with the USB abilities, but so far this player is
definitely worth $170.
Crappy shots of the player in action:
