I particularly love the zoom feature in the Oppo UDP-203 as it beautifully zooms old movies filmed in 4 to 3 ratio into 16 to 9 for our 77inch OLED TV. An excellent example of this in the latest Blu-ray releases of "Show Boat" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon"
I do hope the Reavon includes the same excellent zoom features as featured in the Oppo UDP-203.
Oppo players offer huge bang for the buck, but I was heartbroken and enraged when I found that my Oppo 95-like ALL Oppo BD players-does not allow you to shift and center the desired part of the zoomed image on the screen-like my JVC XV-NA70BK DVD player can, and at 1/7 the price. This oversight was sheer dumbness. Why even bother adding zoom at all if what you want to zoom in on will usually overshoot the screen because you can't center it? And Oppo said that a firmware update won't add the missing functionality.
Not that Sony and Panasonic are any better; not even their top models have zoom. Arcam BD players had complete zoom control but they phased out their BD player line at least a year ago. I saw what was probably their best model for sale new last year but no way will I go for a $1K player only to get stuck with no parts support not many years later. We can probably thank those fascists from the BD Assn who initially advanced Oracle's BD-J BD authoring software, which among other cruel tricks disables zoom control, at least by default. And while none of my Warner and most of my Twilight Time BDs disable zoom, all of my Sony and Criterion Collection discs do. And because brands won't get licensed to make BD players if they don't at least comply with the basic BD-J platform they probably saw no point including zoom anymore-but yet another dumb move as countless users still have large DVD collections, which the BD Assn thugs have little or no legal control over.
As for the Reavon players, because those dopes disabled the Ctrl + F search command in the X200 player manual pdf, I almost missed seeing its zoom feature details on p. 16. But nothing there says that the remote can be used to shift and center the zoomed image. Thus, its zoom may be no better than any Oppo model. I emailed Reavon support to confirm this some days ago; no reply yet.
The worst of it is that even though Sony Electronics reps have asked me a few times this year for my thoughts on their A/V products, it's anyone's guess if or when desired changes will appear in forthcoming BD players. And I've yet to find any way of emailing or calling Panasonic A/V marketing. They clearly don't want to be bothered. And I just learned from Crutchfield of a successor to that top Panasonic 9000 player. Not surprisingly, when sales guy checked the manual it too has no zoom control. It really sucks that a small number of dumb, mean spirited egotistic people can succeed at ruining things for everyone else.
