Somebody contacted me and offered to send me a BDP-83 for review.
They read here at AVS and knew that I had a Pioneer BDP-51FD.
Please do not ask for any details as ive promised this person 100% confidentiality and I will say no more.
My HT consists of:
Pioneer Elite PRO-151FD professionally calibrated plasma HDTV
Pioneer BDP-51FD blu-ray player
Comcast HD cable /1080i is the resolution
Onkyo 805 receiver
AV123 ELT525 5.1 system in rosewood veneer & a MFW-15 subwoofer.
My eye to screen distance is 9' (measured with a tape measure)
Being that the 51 is only my second player I am somewhat of a BD newb
My first BD player was a Panasonic BD-30.
However I am far from being an HT newb as my first HT went together in
the mid 90s.
Here is a quick BD-30 vs BDP-51FD , they are both slow. For some discs the BD-30 is slower and on a some the 51FD is slower. But overall I would say the BD-30 is a tad slower. Being that every BD player ive ever owned up until now (yes just 2) was slow I have learned to live with it and its really not a big deal.
For 1080/24p BD discs both are great performers, however on SD upconversion the 51FD blows the BD-30 away, I am talking night and day difference, that is IMO of course.
There is one area of performance on the 51FD that I have grown to love , it is a fantastic CD player! And I am not using the analog outs on it, I bitstream via HDMI for everything.
My Onkyo 805 has excellent Burr-Brown 192/24-bit DACs.
I was sent a BDP-83 for review free of charge, and a few days ago it
arrived. I am not running the BDP-83 and 51FD at the same time, rather I am just noting which discs and scenes I run on the 83 and how they perform then I will run them again on the 51FD after ive run all that I want to run on the 83. No I am not finished just yet.
I have primarily been focusing on its SD upconversion performance , I ran a few BDs and they looked fantastic as they look on the 51FD.
#1 the BDP-83 is very, very fast. No I have not gone as far as timing the speed , let me just say this , it is way , way faster at everything than both my 51FD and my old BD-30.
At first I told myself, speed alone will not get me to buy an Oppo, but after having it a few days its kind of growing on me and now I will take that back.
So on the SD upconversion, again I am not done but I am sure the Oppo does a better job but its not alot, the 51FD does a good job too but the Oppo is a tad better.
Now vs my old BD-30 the Oppo kills it but so does the 51FD.
Well , I am sorry I don't have more to add as far as SD performance goes, being that both players are good makes this kind of testing difficult.
And remember what I said about the 51FD and CDs above? Well the Oppo is every bit as good.
I will update you all if I come across any performance issues as I finish up my SD testing and comparison against my 51FD.
Thanks guys.
MY HT......
