I got my 203 yesterday. Got it set up, but ran in a few glitches. Maybe some of you 203 owners can share notes?
Played the audio demo BD that came with my BDP-93 from 9 years ago, and noticed I had no center channel. Pulled the racks and rechecked the wiring. Still no center channel output on the test disc's channel ID track. However, when I turn on Test Tone in the Oppo 203's speaker processing menu, I get white noise coming out of center channel when selected. Now the odd part: after using the test tone function, subsequent plays of the AIX Audio Demo revealed working center channel. So no output til I toggled the test tone. Not sure yet if it's persistent between power ups.. will find out tonight.
Next item is that it won't play most media that is on a network share. Some message like "incompatible format" pops up. HOWEVER, when I copy the media to a thumb drive and plug that into the Oppo, it DOES play without issue. I am not running DLNA, so I don't see why playing from any PC hard drive on the network should alter the data like that.
Last item: the Picture Controls don't do anything. I'm used to using this menu on my old '93 player and they work on that player. But not on the 203. And I have the March firmware installed. I tried pushing the slider to + and then -16, but saw no change in brightness, contrast, hue or saturation when each of the respective controls were adjusted. Is this a future feature that is not yet implemented?
To the good, I like the motion activated remote backlight and I love the fact that it is powerful enough to operate the player by bouncing off the screen. I don't have to lean forward anymore and point directly at the player in the rack behind me anymore.
The ability to play various media from thumb drives (and hopefully network) is great.
Picture quality is tremendous. Even the BD-Rs that I authored which originated from 35mb/s XDCam footage of orchestra concerts I shot 8 years ago, look far more detailed than they did on my '93 and my old projector. (I'm using the Sony VPL VW765ES which replaced an InFocus IN82). I always noticed that the top edges of music stands in the orchestra produced aliasing on my old setup, and on the new, it looks like an analog picture with no digital artifacts, yet even more detailed.
Of interest is the DAC filter, which is adjustable. Perhaps Oppo put that in as response to my complaint about the poor squarewave response on the '93. I have yet to put a scope on the output and try my test CD with various settings of the filter. Will report on that later.
So I'm pretty optimistic about the UDP-203 so far. I think I can eliminate a switcher by using the HDMI input to feed my region-free Oppo 981HD into the 203 when I need to watch other region DVDs.