Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have a Samsung BDP-3600 Blu-ray player hooked to a Sony DA5600ES Receiver (HDMI 1.4) which is connect to my 52" Samsung "Touch of Color" TV. I bought the "Sound of Music" Blu-ray for my wife and I was disappointed to find out that my BDP-3600 wouldn't play it. I had the latest firmware update and it still would get stuck trying to load the main menu after several minutes of waiting...very frustrating and disappointing. I figured that new state of the art Blu-ray disks are probably using advanced Blu-ray features older disks simply weren't. So I needed to buy a new Blu-ray player that would handle everything. When I buy anything I try to get the good stuff. When I bought my BDP-3600 it was highly rated but to be clear there were no affordable "high-end" Blu-ray players at the time. Now Oppo has released the BDP-103 which by everything I read was a high-end player with outstanding picture quality and features. I took a gamble and bought it hoping it would blow away my Samsung BDP-3600...it did! The Oppo has noticeably superior picture and really fast disk load times! Blu-ray LOAD SPEED All I can tell you is WOW! The load speed of Blu-ray disks like the Sound of Music, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Avengers, and Prometheus are incredibly fast and completely silent. My BDP-3600 always made grunting noises as it loaded disks and was much slower. Blu-ray PICTURE QUALITY If you think all Blu-ray players have roughly the same picture quality...you are dead wrong. The Oppo BDP-103 blows away my Samsung BDP-3600. The most dramatic difference is with the Blu-ray Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I don't know if you know or even like this family classic but whoever digitally remastered it went all out and it's a work of art. This disk is brighter, sharper, and has the best color and depth of any disk I own. Although it looked very good in my Samsung BDP-3600, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang running on the Oppo BDP-103 produced a picture of such quality and depth that I didn't know it was even possible to reproduce on my TV. The Oppo BDP-103 has really taken my Samsung TV to new heights of jaw dropping picture quality! MOVIES WATCHED on the Oppo BDP-103 I have tried the Indiana Jones movies, The Avengers, Sound of Music, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Prometheus, Alien, and Gladiator. Watching these movies on the Oppo BDP-103 is almost like watching them again for the 1st time. The improvement in picture quality is so good it simply blew me away and I am fussy about such things. PLAYING STREAMING VIDEO I have a strong interest in aviation and have some HD links to classic aircraft on YouTube. Using the built in YouTube player app on the Oppo I played a link to a HD video of the Gloster Gladiator. Whatever video processing wizardry is taking place inside the Oppo it had the same effect on HD web content as it did my Blu-rays. The aircraft looked sharper with greater color and depth of image than I had ever seen. It looked more like a Blu-ray than something off of the web...What an amazing player everything looks better! PLAYING OLDER LETTERBOX DVD's I have some older DVD's that have not be rereleased on Blu-ray yet. I tried to buy all anamorphic DVD's but you can't always get them in that format. I loaded up the comedy Rushmore and got the standard black boarder all the way around the movie. It kind of makes you think...what a waste of real-estate...it's such a small picture on this big screen...I refuse to watch it like this! Well as part of the incredible video processing capability of the Oppo it also has superior video scaling technology built in. Just a touch of the button and I was able to zoom in on the picture to where it fit the screen appropriately. The surprising thing was that the picture quality was still very good. Not comparible to a state of the art Blu-ray mind you but way better than your DVD's has ever looked on a typical DVD player. The quality of zoomed DVD playback is such that even though I have been spoiled by Blu-ray quality, I'm not disappointed to play my old Letterbox DVD's anymore! PLAYING SACD's (Super CD) I had the Sony S9000ES DVD/SACD player which was AA rated at the time. I bought a few SACD's back then just to find out how good digital recordings could sound. Unfortuantly you could only connect your SACD player to your receiver with analog connections because of legal issues around digital copy rights. Fast forward to the present. The Oppo BDP-103 plays SACD through digital connections...OMG! As you would expect it was a very smooth natural sound with excellent dynamic range. None of the digital harshness of CD audio. It's just more icing on the cake. SUMMARY If you're serious about enjoying a high-quality Home Theater experience, you are missing out unless you own the Oppo-BDP-103. This high-end Blu-ray player has picture quality and speed far superior to a PS3 or your typical name brand Blu-ray players. Here's to Oppo for striving and achieving video processing excellence!!! NOTES If routing this through your AV receiver, make sure it supports HDMI 1.4 or you won't get the full quality of the video signal coming from the Oppo. The Oppo also has a work around for receivers that don't support HDMI 1.4. It has 2-additional HDMI outs so you send 1-HDMI directly to your TV (for top picture quality) and other to your AV receiver so it can process the sound. The Oppo BDP-103 does far more than I listed here. Take a look at the specs or better yet buy one...you won't regret it. HOW DO I PRONOUNCE OPPO? The consensus of informed opinion is "OH no, OH Poe!" 4/13/2014 Update: I bought an iPhone 5s. The OPPO has a feature which lets you link your iPhone to the OPPO so you can search for YouTube content on your iPhone and then play it on your OPPO! This is really sweet because it so much easier to perform searches on an iPhone than using the OPPO remote control. Also not a single problem with the OPPO since I bought it. It continues to play every new Blu-ray disk I purchase flawlessly!.