Thank you for your viewpoint and feedback to my question here PENG; however, there are a couple of points I would like to discuss with you regarding the elements you bring to the table...
I don't have the 83 but I have read tons of user reviews/comments to know that they are probably almost the same. As I said before, this DVD upscaling thing has been hyped to the nth degree. Based on my own viewing experience, it is the quality of the transfer itself that has the most impact on the overall PQ. If the transfer is of high quality, most mid range BDP and TV will do well enough that one can hardly discern the difference. If the transfer is of low quality, even the Oppo cannot do anything about it.
I understand that it's been debated ad nauseum the "benefits" of DVD upscaling and what that entails or doesn't entail, etc. etc...but I must say, to many of us -- me definitely included here -- DVD upconversion is still a very important, judge-worthy aspect of a Blu-ray player's performance due to the large collections many of us still watch on a regular basis. I, for one, was looking for a Blu-ray player before I received the BDP-83 as a holiday present that offered superior DVD upconversion as one of the primary necessities (along with bitstreaming capability for TrueHD and Master Audio) and this was all due to the piss-poor (that's right -- I did type piss-poor because that's exactly what it was, and was confirmed by various sources) DVD performance of my first generation Panasonic DMP-BD10A BD player. So, I don't really agree with your assesment of "...one can hardly discern the difference..." with regard to DVD upconversion -- it is clear that many machines are NOT the same in this area of the game. My Panasonic would render DVD Video discs in 1080p with horrendous artifacting, macro-blocking, aliasing (horrible jagged edges) and an overall almost unwatchable image -- and this was confirmed by sites that reviewed the player and other owners of this model; something in the BD10A's UniPhier processor just didn't do deinterlacing and scaling that good -- to say the least (I may be wrong about the name of the processor -- I think the UniPhier was the one in the BD10A, but at any rate, it sucked).
Thus, I was left with suffering through watching DVDs -- even well mastered ones -- on this player that wasn't upscaling them well at all; sure, some reference video titles on DVD, such as select Superbits from Columbia (Sony) were rendered watchable, but for the most part, DVDs looked TERRIBLE on this player. When I got the Oppo, it took some time, but I began to notice a ridiculous improvement in upconversion performance to 1080p -- gone were the jagged edges on poorly mastered discs, most of the artifacting and block noise (which weren't in the original source, so the Panasonic must have been creating much of this garbage) and other anamolies...
However -- you are correct in stating a poor DVD transfer will be just that, a poor transfer, and no consumer-level DVD playback product is going to be able to miraculously make it look "better." I learned this the hard way when I was looking at notably flawed DVD transfers on the BDP-83, and noticed they didn't look all that much better, as a whole, on this player -- and so I was immediately alarmed and taken aback. It was then explained to me by people that had a lot of experience with Oppo's products and the Anchor Bay processor -- and Oppo themselves -- that the VRS chip wasn't designed to do any "magic acts" in terms of cleaning up bad looking DVDs; it excels at making well mastered titles look nearly like Blu-ray, and in that regard, it succeeds beyond well enough.
But, I just wanted to let you know that there are still some of us out there who value DVD upconversion very much -- and that there are differences between these players and how they handle this, based on their processor guts.
As such, I wanted to know if anyone had seen any direct, certifiable differences in DVD playback at 1080p between the BDP-83 and the 95...
I have no doubt, the 83/93 will score better than many other BDPs, but watching real video/movies, I will not bother using my 95 to play DVD as I want to save it for serious SACD/CD listening. Any perceived improvements due to its excellent upscaler is too insignificant for me to pick the Oppo over my other players including the PS3. I will continue to play DVD with my Toshiba XDE500 until it dies, then I will play DVDs with my other BDPs. The Oppo will be used strictly for BR concerts videos, SACD, DVDA, and CD. I know that's just me and I may be bias.
I understand; but as I said -- many of us definitely do still use our BD players as DVD players ane require the best performance out of them for this purpose. For what it's worth, I personally don't use the BDP-83 for SACD or CD playback, only DVD and BD video playback, so you and I have different priorities in terms of purpose for these decks.
