OPPO Bluray BDP 93, not Pioneer, Marantz, Denon

Traditionally, the difference in picture quality between blu-ray players have not been very great. There simply is not room for some dramatic differences or variations when the movie is played and sent digitally to the screen. The Oppo player, however, has a great opportunity to show what a difference a good video processor can do. It is only one of the two HDMI outputs that pass through the advanced Kyoto chip, the other retrieves the video signal directly from the circuit board and sends it on to the screen without any additional signal processing.

​The difference between the two outputs is subtle, yet fully apparent. The picture from HDMI 2 output is very good, but the HDMI 1 output still gives a significantly sharper and more detailed, noise-free image with a stable sharpness even when the image is moving. The same applies to the upscaling of DVD and other low-resolution video sources, the picture becomes even more seamless through the advanced video chip. The BDP-103 also does wonders with streaming from YouTube and Netflix: low-res material looks "okay" but pick a video with HD resolution and it can look really good, with less visible compression and noise than we're used to.

Oppo BDP-103 has a slightly simpler analog section than its big brother, the BDP-105. Yet it is far from being an amiss player we ‘re talking about: The BDP-103 does an excellent job as an analog audio device in stereo.

​The BDP-103 also has opportunities for those who have an older home theater amplifier - or none at all. The Oppo player has a built-in surround decoder with analog outputs for all channels (7.1). It also has a volume control that is controlled from the remote control, including separate level and distance adjusting to all the speakers! This means that in principle it can be connected directly to a power amplifier, or powered speakers.

One could almost call it a "blu-ray preamplifier".