>> Hi, I'm Matthew Moskovciak, Senior Associate Editor at CNET.com. And we're here with the OPPO BDP80. This Bluray player is a step down from OPPO's highend BDP83, so we're interested to see if you could get much of the functionality of that highend Bluray player at a much lower price tag. Like all of OPPO's Bluray players, the BDP80 has a bit more of a rugged design. The faceplate is plastic, unlike the brush metal of some of the other ones, but it doesn't look as sleek as a lot of the more mainstream competitors. That utilitarian feel also transfers to the graphical user interface, which is pretty simple. You're not going to see a lot of the eye candy that you'll see on other Bluray players. Now, a big reason why it's so simple is that the BDP80 doesn't have a lot to choose from. There are no streaming media services available on this Bluray player like Netflix or VUDU, and that's pretty much a standard feature on any other Bluray player you're going to find. There's also no builtin WiFi, which is also typically standard at this price point. So if you want to take advantage of some of the BD live features, you're going to have to use an Ethernet connection or buy the optional wireless bridge that OPPO offers. If you look around back at the connectivity, it's pretty standard with the major exception being that it has 7.1 analog outputs. Now, that's a nice step up, and it's a feature you don't see on as many Bluray players these days. So if you have an older AV receiver that doesn't have HDMI, you'll still be able to take advantage of the full resolution of Dolby TrueHD and DTSHD Master Audio soundtracks. Moving to Bluray performance, overall, we found that the BDP80 was excellent. It passed all of our major program material tests. Now, we did find that it stumbled on a few of the test patterns that we threw at it, which we don't really feel is a big deal. But considering the fact that it lacks a lot of features and it has a relatively high price, we were a little disappointed to see that. Also, when we looked at DVD performance, we also didn't feel that the performance was much better than the competition to justify the relatively high price tag. Now, to be fair, OPPO intends the BDP80 to be used primarily by home theater enthusiasts that are using an outboard video scaler. So if that's your main purpose, the BDP80 is going to be a good choice. However, if you're intending to use it as a standalone Bluray player, we didn't feel that its performance made up for some of its missing features like WiFi, streaming media features and the overall high price considering what it offers. I'm Matthew Moskovciak, Senior Associate Editor at CNET.com, and we're here with the OPPO BDP80.
