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I’m going to get an Oppo Digital 983H DVD player for myself. As you’ve read here at Secrets, it is an excellent DVD player, actually the best ever made probably. Now why would I want to have anything to do with standard definition? Shouldn’t someone in my possition be chanting “HD or bust!” ?
First off, I have a pretty decent movie collection on DVD which I shall continue to enjoy. Most of the titles I own are not yet avalable in any form of HD (and may not be for some time). But there is another reason to keep top-notch DVD equipment “in-play” so to speak.
I remember almost 10 years ago when DVD was brand new. I might not have been the first one in my town to get a player, but I was one of the first. I bought into DVD when a “cheap” player was $700 and Blockbuster was not yet on the DVD band wagon. The only place I could rent movies was the one, very small, specialty AV store in town who had only the more obvious new releases, and only one copy each at that. Those of us in town with DVD players would literally put ourselves on a waiting list at the store to rent a given title. I did a LOT of movie buying in those days.
The point here is that back then on many a weekend we would pass up a movie we might have been really interested in because it was not available to us on DVD. Instead we rented a movie we maybe weren’t particularly interested in just because it was on DVD.
Life is too short for that nonsense.
Granted, we now live in a world of NetFlix (or Zip.ca here in Canada) and they’ve got all the Blu-Ray you could want but I still like going to Jumbo Video and picking out a movie or two for the night, based on what I feel like watching at that moment.
Well, Jumbo and Blockbuster have maybe a couple dozen titles right now, and only one copy of many of them so pickings are slim to say the least. If the Blu-Ray version is there, great, but I’m not going to pass on a potentially good movie just because it isnt.
For me this next little while is going to be a Blu-Ray “buying” period but when it comes to a movie I just want to rent, DVD is “it” (for now at least) and frankly, when piped through a good processor/scaller like the one in Oppo’s 983H, its perfectly watchable on my 1080p TV. No, its not as good as HD, but good enough to enjoy the movie, and certainly closer to HD than VHS was to DVD, which of course is a big part of why HD-on-disc has had such a slow takeoff, but that’s a subject for another day.