I am considering a new DVD player to allow for better upscaling of standard DVDs. My display is a Sony Grand Wega KDF 55WF655 LCD Projection 55". Because of this I am not looking at the Oppo 971 or 981 due to the artifact problems.

The Oppo is $150 and the Toshiba is $350. My thinking is that the Toshiba is worth the extra $$ to get HD until the format wars are over. However, my main concern is the quality of the upscaling to 1080i. Does anyone have any experience or ideas of how these two units would compare on non-HD DVDs upscaling to 1080i over HDMI?

I don't have the A2, I have an A1 and the Oppo 970. But I much prefer the A1's upscaling and image over the oppo. It may be more money, but the oppo can't give you HD-DVD, so it's worth the money.

I thought I would bump this thread.
Has anyone compared the A2 to the Oppo for upscaling?

I agree with gtaylor.. for what it is worth the A1 blows the 970 away. I can't see a reason why an A2 would not be similar. The XA2 and the 970 are not even a fair comparison.

None of these players "blows away" the others if you have a relatively new TV.

The internal scalers are all so good, the improvements/differences are slight.

I have an A2 and have compared it to XBOX (480i component), Panny S52 upscale, and Sony 75 upscale (very very similar to the Oppo 970, uses the same chipset for scaling) and the differences between all are not very different. All calibrated, all on the same 2006 model Sony E2000 LCD RPTV.

They all produce very good pictures with clean, newer SD DVD releases. The A2 cleans up older, poorer transfers better than the rest, but even then it's pretty slight.

If all you do is watch SD DVD I would just buy the $70 Panny S52 (but only if you can use HDMI). Otherwise the Sony 75 and Oppo 970 are about the same, the Oppo handles more types of discs though, and since it's about the same price it's probably worth buying.

I spent the little bit extra for the A2 so I could try out HD-DVD and would still have a great SD-DVD player. I'm also putting in a projector and wanted to be able to feed it the best content to show it off.

I have the HD-XA2 and the OPPO 970. The XA2 easily blows away the 970 at 480p. The XA2 also blows away my earlier HD-A1 at 480p. If you are feeding the display a 480i signal there is unlikely to be much difference between the players. However, very few people have displays that de-interlace better than any of the players listed.

There is no doubt that the XA2 has a better upconvert than the Oppo.
The question is: What about the A2 vs the Oppo?

None of these players "blows away" the others if you have a relatively new TV.



MPEG decoding and deinterlacing vary widely amongst players and can very different results; scaling is only part of the equation and probably the easiest.

I agree with the deinterlacing. Some of the players I've reviewed output a terrible 480p signal. In that case, I let the TV do the deinterlace and scale and it looks great.

I have yet to see a poor MPEG decoder from the XBOX, Panny S52, Sony 75, Samsung, or Toshiba HD-A2.

My only point is that for most people, they read these forums, see stuff like "blows away" and think they are going to be able to watch DVDs in a whole new way. For the vast majority of them they probably have a decent DVD player and a new TV, so they won't see a big difference.