djironic
02-26-07, 02:34 AM
My Yamaha S-1500 finally crapped out on me (the second S-1500 to go bust in three years – I’m really not the biggest fan of Yammys right now!), so I picked up a Sony NS75H and an Oppo 970H and did an exhaustive comparison on my three-year old Hitachi CRT RPTV (51S700), connecting the players with both component cables and HDMI-DVI cables.
The short version of this post goes like this: both have great pictures once you have done a lot of calibrating. If you don’t care about having a universal player, go with the cheaper Sony. It features great usability and has a picture that is very competitive with the Oppo.
What I like about the Sony:
The response times seem a smidge quicker than the Oppo, and Sony’s interface is very intuitive and easy to use. I would say Sony had the edge here.
Sony’s remote, while hardly exciting, is well-laid out and ergonomic, as well as easy to use in the dark. Edge again goes to the Sony.
Sony has a memory function that remembers the last 40 DVDs played and will restart them at the point at which they were stopped. Very useful for me, but you can also turn this function off.
Front-panel LED easy-to-read and not obtrusive.
What I don’t like about the Sony:
Front-panel LED is blue – looks cheap.
Entire player looks cheaply made, though it does seem sturdy enough. Just doesn’t fit well with higher-end components.
What I like about the Oppo:
Universal player plays SACDs and DVD-As.
“Direct Play” feature can (sometimes) allow you to skip intros and get straight to the movie. This didn’t always work – you really have to time it right.
Amber LED looks a lot nicer than the cheaper looking blue, though sometimes the display itself is a bit harder to read than the Sony (less space devoted to text).
What I don’t like about the Oppo
Front-panel LED is BRIGHT! Wish there was a way to dim it.
The remote is poorly laid out, packed with buttons, and unintuitive. Very hard to operate in the dark, as the buttons are all the same size and spaced perfectly evenly. Really don’t like the remote…
Lack of any kind of "Resume Play" function after shutdown.
DVD tray looks a bit flimsy (I’m sure it’s not) and is a bit awkward to load and unload.
Like the Sony, the player looks cheaply made, though, again, it's sturdy enough.
Performance
Both players required quite a bit of calibration, but both had similar pictures once calibrated.
Both players passed blacker-than-black.
When using HDMI, both players had some issues with the color decoder, requiring me to crank up the green a lot on both players (up 15% on the Oppo), and the red a little on the Sony (up 3%). There was also a -.07 YC Delay error on both players at 1080i. Switching the Oppo to 480p corrected the error. Color accuracy was less of an issue when using a component connection.
Overscan was more of an issue on the Sony, with about a 5% loss all the way around (6% left, 4% top, 5% right, 5% bottom). Overscan with the Oppo ran 5% left, 1% top, 5% right, and 1% bottom.
Oppo seemed to handle the 3:2 pulldown a bit quicker than the Sony, and seemed to have an overall edge on deinterlacing as well. However, the Sony did a great job and Oppo’s lead was not significant in this area.
Surprisingly enough, the 1080i picture on both players was very soft, requiring me to increase the sharpness to at least 50% to get proper detail. The component picture also required sharpening, but not to the same extent as the upscaled picture. The picture got noisy very quickly, however, so it took a while to find the right balance between acheiving detail and being overwhelmed with noise.
I’m less skilled at determining audio superiority. Somehow I feel like the Sony got just a little more mileage out of a soundtrack, but they both sounded good.
Conclusion
I haven’t made my final decision, but I’m leaning towards the Oppo, despite its drawbacks. The picture seemed to be just a touch better than the Sony, and it’s easier to return the Sony than the Oppo. My Yammy still plays SACD and DVD-A (only the video chip is fried, apparently), so I *could* continue to use it for audio and the Sony for video, but it would be nice to have one player for everything.
So, for anyone looking at these two players, my recommendation would be to go with the Sony if you don’t need a universal player. The differences between the two in terms of PQ wouldn’t be enough for me to justify paying an extra $50, and the Sony seems to be the more user-friendly of the two.
The short version of this post goes like this: both have great pictures once you have done a lot of calibrating. If you don’t care about having a universal player, go with the cheaper Sony. It features great usability and has a picture that is very competitive with the Oppo.
What I like about the Sony:
The response times seem a smidge quicker than the Oppo, and Sony’s interface is very intuitive and easy to use. I would say Sony had the edge here.
Sony’s remote, while hardly exciting, is well-laid out and ergonomic, as well as easy to use in the dark. Edge again goes to the Sony.
Sony has a memory function that remembers the last 40 DVDs played and will restart them at the point at which they were stopped. Very useful for me, but you can also turn this function off.
Front-panel LED easy-to-read and not obtrusive.
What I don’t like about the Sony:
Front-panel LED is blue – looks cheap.
Entire player looks cheaply made, though it does seem sturdy enough. Just doesn’t fit well with higher-end components.
What I like about the Oppo:
Universal player plays SACDs and DVD-As.
“Direct Play” feature can (sometimes) allow you to skip intros and get straight to the movie. This didn’t always work – you really have to time it right.
Amber LED looks a lot nicer than the cheaper looking blue, though sometimes the display itself is a bit harder to read than the Sony (less space devoted to text).
What I don’t like about the Oppo
Front-panel LED is BRIGHT! Wish there was a way to dim it.
The remote is poorly laid out, packed with buttons, and unintuitive. Very hard to operate in the dark, as the buttons are all the same size and spaced perfectly evenly. Really don’t like the remote…
Lack of any kind of "Resume Play" function after shutdown.
DVD tray looks a bit flimsy (I’m sure it’s not) and is a bit awkward to load and unload.
Like the Sony, the player looks cheaply made, though, again, it's sturdy enough.
Performance
Both players required quite a bit of calibration, but both had similar pictures once calibrated.
Both players passed blacker-than-black.
When using HDMI, both players had some issues with the color decoder, requiring me to crank up the green a lot on both players (up 15% on the Oppo), and the red a little on the Sony (up 3%). There was also a -.07 YC Delay error on both players at 1080i. Switching the Oppo to 480p corrected the error. Color accuracy was less of an issue when using a component connection.
Overscan was more of an issue on the Sony, with about a 5% loss all the way around (6% left, 4% top, 5% right, 5% bottom). Overscan with the Oppo ran 5% left, 1% top, 5% right, and 1% bottom.
Oppo seemed to handle the 3:2 pulldown a bit quicker than the Sony, and seemed to have an overall edge on deinterlacing as well. However, the Sony did a great job and Oppo’s lead was not significant in this area.
Surprisingly enough, the 1080i picture on both players was very soft, requiring me to increase the sharpness to at least 50% to get proper detail. The component picture also required sharpening, but not to the same extent as the upscaled picture. The picture got noisy very quickly, however, so it took a while to find the right balance between acheiving detail and being overwhelmed with noise.
I’m less skilled at determining audio superiority. Somehow I feel like the Sony got just a little more mileage out of a soundtrack, but they both sounded good.
Conclusion
I haven’t made my final decision, but I’m leaning towards the Oppo, despite its drawbacks. The picture seemed to be just a touch better than the Sony, and it’s easier to return the Sony than the Oppo. My Yammy still plays SACD and DVD-A (only the video chip is fried, apparently), so I *could* continue to use it for audio and the Sony for video, but it would be nice to have one player for everything.
So, for anyone looking at these two players, my recommendation would be to go with the Sony if you don’t need a universal player. The differences between the two in terms of PQ wouldn’t be enough for me to justify paying an extra $50, and the Sony seems to be the more user-friendly of the two.