UPDATED List of Oppo Firmware Defects (in approximate order of severity):
CURRENT DEFECTS:
1. The warm-up issue is completely gone since the hardware fix, but 1080i sync still remains a problem for many displays. Some displays have no problem at all, others experience wobbling/shaking of the image, and some experience worse symptoms.
2. Sharpness control. Still some vertical edge enhancement on the “Low” setting. Check wishlist item #1 (adds edge enhancement when enabled).
DVI Shimmering. Near-vertical high-contrast lines are not rendered smoothly. Such lines appear jagged, breaking into smaller line-segments with white edge enhancement next to each segment. When the camera pans slowly in any direction, those segments seem to “crawl” up or down the vertical lines. Multiple parallel lines draw attention to this artifact very dramatically because every line-segment “crawls” simultaneously, and from a distance, the image appears to be “shimmering”. Affects PAL and NTSC.
3. Faroudja's “Cross Color Suppression” feature should be user-selectable (ON/OFF) via menu. The default should be OFF, to prevent image flickering. However, the CCS feature does have benefits with some types of viewing material.
4. Flickering - minor random twitching of all (or parts) of the image on some material, often seen on the edges of white motionless text (this may be related to the Cross Color Suppression?)
5. Faroudja's "macroblock enhance" bug. Macroblocking appears on some DVD’s as an artifact of heavy MPEG compression. It is normally very subtle, but the Faroudja chip greatly exaggerates it, so that it becomes obnoxiously distracting on some displays. Panasonic has recently worked with Faroudja to reduce this problem to some degree in their player. Apparently, it cannot be fixed altogether. Macroblocking looks like patches of moving/pulsating off-color blocks, and is most often seen on background walls and floors, in mist, and in fade-in/fade-out scenes.
6. Faroudja's intermittent VIDEO delay (lip-sync) problem. Only occurs on the DVI output. Video suddenly begins to lag the audio (badly) at an arbitrary point during DVD playback. Sync will be temporarily restored if you pause the DVD, and then resume play. Some DVD’s are worse than others, but the problem is entirely random, and usually cannot be repeated by rewinding the scene that triggered it.
7. A/V sync becomes progressively worse when fast-forwarding Divx files. Some Divx files with VBR-mp3 audio work fine for the first few seconds, and then audio becomes intermittent (video remains OK).
8. In DVI Wide/SQZ mode, the vertical stretch for 1.5x (and higher) zooms is not quite enough to maintain the correct image proportions. Currently, a perfect circle/square, recorded on a non-anamorphic DVD, is not displayed correctly when zooming to 1.5x and above. DVD pixels are not square, so for a DVI (square-pixel) display, it is necessary to zoom more in the vertical direction than the horizontal.
9. DVI Wide/SQZ mode is losing horizontal resolution on 4:3 material with 1x zoom. This may be because the Mediatek chip squeezes the image for the analog outputs before the Faroudja chip scales the image for the DVI output. Full resolution is restored as soon as you use the zoom.
10. Does not automatically display the DVD subtitle-set containing the translation for brief foreign dialog. DVD’s like Hidalgo and Star Wars have this extra subtitle. Oppo defaults to ALL subtitles OFF.
11. Uneven color output over component.
12. Will not pass "blacker-than-black" over component.
WISHLIST:
1. Faroudja's “TrueLife Detail Enhancement” feature should be user-selectable via menu. The default should be OFF. This feature evidently adds edge enhancement when enabled, even on the minimum setting.
2. The angle-mode icon should be user-selectable (ON/OFF) via menu. Some DVD’s have lots of alternate angles recorded, so the icon pops up continuously throughout the movie.
3. Memory to recall your place on the current disc after powering off. Useful to continue watching a movie where you left off previously. To prevent it becoming a nuisance, the memory should be cleared when opening the tray (to remove the disk), or pressing stop twice (as it currently does).
4. Discrete remote commands for power-on and power-off. Makes it easier for universal remotes to control the player without having to keep track of power status.
5. While displaying DVD stills, the pause button sometimes causes a chapter-skip or causes the player to temporarily stop responding to remote commands (particularly in the Avia test patterns).
6. Random/shuffle option for music CD's.
7. Gamma adjustment.
