Oppo Debut New Blu-ray Player

The Oppo BDP-83 is one of our favourite blu-ray players available today, but despite its value for money, its price may be slightly over what many are prepared to shell out for an HD player.  However, accessing Oppo's high quality Blu-ray drive is less of a problem with the announcement of the BDP-80 which will sell at a much lower price point, as it wears a retail cost of $289.

The BDP-80 is a Profile 2.0 player which will playback Blu-ray, DVD and SACD discs, with support for 1080p and 24fps video.  Of course, DVDs are upscaled to 1080i and there is Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio decoding, plus a set of 7.1 analogue audio outputs around the back.  The Oppo has two USB ports, 1GB of internal memory and an HDMI 1.3 socket. 

So what's missing?  The Anchor Bay VRS chip has been replaced by a 'System-on-Chip' with custom firmware is probably the biggest change, along with no DVD 24p conversion support, no dedicated stereo analogue output or infrared in/out port and the chassis has been constructed from plastic rather then the BDP-83's aluminium. 

There is no word on a fixed release date in the US or Europe at this point, but when we know more, we'll update you.