If you recently upgraded to HDTV and are considering rebuilding your DVD library with either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, you might want to hold off on that for a bit. Since nobody has yet won the 'format war', you do not want to be stuck with movies in a format that will no longer be supported. So what can you do while waiting for the 'war' to be won? Oppo has the solution; a DVD player that upconverts 720x480 resolution DVDs all the way up to 1080x1920! It boasts a great deinterlacer, and image enhancement that will put the full resolution to use, all for about $230. Is it better than a standard 480p DVD player? Is it good enough that you don't even need to consider Blu-Ray or HD-DVD?

My overall impression of the DV-981HD is that if the source material is very high quality, the results are excellent - almost reaching close to 1080i HD quality like that seen on Blu-Ray. My first 'wow' experience with the Oppo was watching Kingdom of Heaven: The Director's Cut. If you were to play this on the DV-981HD and a good TV, you almost wouldn't be able to tell whether you were watching it on DVD or Blu-Ray. The stylized palette of colours used by Ridley Scott are very evident here, with deep blues used for the 'home' sequences, a harsh red overcast in the daytime desert scenes, an a sort of 'fuzzy' warm romantic look to the indoor scenes in the Kingdom. Most of all, it had a very three-dimensional look, usually only reserved for true High Definition content. But no, this was a lowly 720x480 DVD. DVD at its best, to be sure.

However, when I watched my old Pulp Fiction DVD - which is a non-anamorphic release - I was reminded immediately that as good as the DV-981HD is, it is still DVD. Thankfully, it handles non-anamorphic material quite well (if you still have any). Plenty of zoom ranges are given, so you don't have to worry about the letterboxing on the sides of the picture. You could use your TV's zoom, and it may be better depending on the particular set, and how many zoom ranges it has.

With a poor-quality release like the original Pulp Fiction DVD, some problems are taken care of by excellent deinterlacing and noise reduction, but some seem to be made even worse watching them on a high definition display. If you want to give someone an example of why Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD are far superior to DVD, this is a good one to show them.