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Author Topic: OPPO Digital Shutting Down Martin Brooks Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 900 From: Forest Hills, NY, USA Registered: May 2002 posted 04-03-2018 03:51 PM                        OPPO has announced that it will phase out the production of its Blu-ray and UHD players as well as its other electronics. Looks like it will concentrate on its smartphone business. ----- Farewell It has been 14 years since we established OPPO Digital in the United States, and with the support of our customers, technical partners, and movie/music studios, we produced many award-winning Hi-Fi audio products and universal disc players, spanning three generations from DVD, Blu-ray, to 4K UHD. As our latest 4K UHD players reach the pinnacle of their performance, it is time to say goodbye. We are proud to have made such well-regarded products and to have served the enthusiast community. Without our customers' suggestions, encouragement, and support, we could not have accomplished these achievements. Though OPPO Digital will gradually stop manufacturing new products, existing products will continue to be supported, warranties will still be valid, and both in-warranty and out-of-warranty repair services will continue to be available. Firmware will continue to be maintained and updates released from time to time. Customers can rest assured that they will continue to receive the high quality service and support that they have come to expect from OPPO Digital. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to have developed such exciting products for our customers. It has been an honor. Best regards, All of us at OPPO Digital Frequently Asked Questions: As announced on April 2nd, 2018, OPPO Digital will gradually stop manufacturing new products. Existing products will continue to be supported, warranties will still be valid, and both in-warranty and out-of-warranty repair services will continue to be available. Firmware will continue to be maintained and updates released from time to time. Customers can rest assured that they will continue to receive the high quality service and support that they have come to expect from OPPO Digital. The following FAQ provides answers to questions that may arise from the announcement. How do I receive technical support for my OPPO product? Technical support will continue to be available. Please visit the product support page on the OPPO Digital web site (https://www.oppodigital.com/Support.aspx) for self-guided support, and use the following contact form to submit your customer service request: https://www.oppodigital.com/ContactUs.aspx How do I set up in-warranty or out-of-warranty repair service for my OPPO product? Repair service will remain available for OPPO Digital products. Please use the following contact form to submit your repair service request: https://www.oppodigital.com/ContactUs.aspx Will there still be firmware upgrades for my OPPO products? Yes, products will continue to receive firmware upgrades from time to time when new features or bug fixes warrant such an upgrade. Newer products such as the UDP-203 and UDP-205 will likely receive more frequent upgrades while mature products such as the BDP-103 and earlier models will only get firmware upgrades if there are critical fixes. If your player is connected to the Internet, you can check for firmware upgrades by going to the Setup Menu / Device Setup / Firmware Upgrade / Via Network. New firmware will also be posted on the support pages of the corresponding products (https://www.oppodigital.com/Support.aspx) I purchased my OPPO product less than 30 days ago. Am I still able to return it for a refund? OPPO Digital continues to offer its 30-day Money Back Guarantee for products purchased directly from OPPO Digital within the last 30 days. If you would like to return your product for a refund, please use the following contact form to submit your refund request: https://www.oppodigital.com/ContactUs.aspx I am still interested in OPPO's products - how can I purchase one? OPPO Digital's products can still be purchased through the OPPO Digital web site, OPPO Digital's authorized resellers and OPPO Digital's overseas distributors. As we gradually stop manufacturing new products, certain models may go out of stock and no longer be available sooner than other models. Will OPPO Digital develop and release future generation of products? From now on, OPPO Digital will focus our main effort on organizing and ensuring long term support for the existing generation of products. As such, we will not have the resources to develop and release new generations of products. -----  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-03-2018 06:31 PM                        I have a non-working Oppo BluRay player. It was pretty erratic from the time it was new, constantly hanging up and etc. Finally it just quit altogether and won't even turn on anymore. Just my luck to (apparently) get the only crappy machine they ever made. Since I started using DCP-O-Matic, I convert any BluRays we have to play into DCPs so we haven't had a need for a BR player in several years anyway, so I haven't missed it.  |  IP: Logged Louie Gonsalves Film Handler Posts: 16 From: Tamarac, FL, USA Registered: Jul 2012 posted 04-03-2018 07:56 PM                     *sigh* This may well be what pushes me firmly into the itunes camp for "buying" movies. I bought a bdp-103 in 2015 because I was so disillusioned with the then-current crop of "mass market" players. Now, with Oppo gone, what's left? That 103 may be the last disc player I buy. Last Jedi and Coco may well be the last two blu-rays I buy. I just got them last week. This is purely conjecture on my part, but perhaps Oppo threw in the towel due to declining disc sales? It's like the industry *hates* physical media or something..! I haven't done an a/b test, but I have a few movies in bluray that also happen to be on Netflix streaming, which I use through an apple TV gen 4 into a Panasonic AE8000 lcd projector onto a 7-ft white no-gain screen. When I view dark material such as Brave or Rogue One on the apple TV I don't find myself wanting more.. so.. maybe the non-corporeal future will be OK.. (except for whole no-ownership thing, how do I know what I buy in itunes* will be there 10, 15, 20 years from now?) * Why itunes and not Amazon? Because I already give amazon my $ for merch and shipping, I refuse to give them a penny more for video. My first itunes "bought" flick may well be Fritz Lang's "M".  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 04-03-2018 10:28 PM                        If your Oppo still works, I'd recommend the Criterion BD of "M". Very high bitrate, preserves the Movietone aspect ratio, mono audio on the center channel, and is the most complete version available, including the closing scene outside the courtroom. The extras are not bad (though the MOD and ROD didn't tell me anything significant that I didn't know already), and the subtitles are encoded rather than burnt in, so you can switch them off if you understand German (or just know the movie very well) and don't need them. I'm guessing that Oppo decided to quit because they weren't selling enough players to be able to keep making them and achieving a worthwhile margin. I'm not sure that this necessarily indicates a terminal decline in BD media sales, given how much more expensive Oppo players are relative to the mass market ones. There just aren't that many people who look at what an Oppo player costing $800 has to offer, and then look at what a mass market player costing $80 has to offer, and decide that the extra $720 is worth it.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 04-04-2018 03:40 AM                     Being an authorized Oppo reseller, I was/am shocked and dismayed at the news. Our Oppo sales have been pretty steady, to this day. For us, just about every cinema screen gets one on a new install and many have bought one that didn't have one. It is definitely the go-to player. I'll admit, I preferred the BDP-103 to the UDP-203. In the cinema, the 4K output is of near zero value (unless you have a Barco ICMP, your alternative content resolution is going to be 2K). However, in the name of that 4K output, they decided to make the second HDMI output audio only. The BDP-103 had dual 1080 outputs so you could feed a preview monitor and the projector simultaneously, which was awesome for cueing up movies. Another nifty feature of the Oppo was that it had HDMI inputs (again, the 103 had the edge with TWO HDMI inputs, of which one is in the front). As such, it could become a mini-switcher scaler as well as audio extractor. The two downsides are/were: it only worked with video resolutions/frame rates (no computer ones so your computer had to work with things like 1080p) and it was quite temperamental with switching between HDMI and BD rapidly. It would down mix to whatever your sound system was capable of and would also decode whatever the audio format was to PCM on the HDMI cable or turn off the sound on the HDMI (one less thing to crap HDCP since most projectors don't ask for audio). I even liked that one can get to the setup menu without stopping the movie. Just a really nice solid product. The only product that has some "integrator friendly" features is the Denon DT-500BD MK II but the support from Denon is nowhere near Oppos and the feature set isn't anywhere near as complete. As to why Oppo is discontinuing, I reached out to some of our A/V partners and the reality is in the A/V world, VERY FEW disc players are sold/installed anymore. What content is shown is streamed or run off of a computer. That leaves the home market, which Oppo was always focused on. It took them a long time to give "us" the OSD-Off option. To this day, they haven't "gotten around" to applying the serial commands to the Ethernet port. You can use the Ethernet port to control it/them but it is a nasty command set based on the IR commands. The realities are that the current and upcoming generation of people just aren't going to buy little discs that they have to store somewhere. That is an old-fuddy-duddy sort of thing. So you have the cinema market (and we're not the only resellers to the cinema market) that is a tiny market that can't support such a product, the A/V market that has shrunk to near zero and the home market that has a trend line heading to zero. Do you ride it out, laying off people, month by month until you start losing money? Or do you realize that there are market forces beyond your control and act accordingly, and, quite frankly, responsibility? You announce your exit, let people make their last buys, and support the products you sold, while you can? It isn't that there isn't a home market still but there is a trend away from it and that market is cut up a bazillion ways. Oppo is a high-end player. It isn't $800, it is $549 (for the UDP-203), BTW. So yes, more expensive but you don't need to add in another 50%! So you are only going to get a portion of that market, that isn't really growing. The only way to sell new units would be to bring out new products to get existing customers to replace what they have (high-end people will do that) but that costs real $$$ and on a progressively shrinking market. It is a tough place to be in. I'm sure they were hoping that the UHD 4K Blu-ray would stimulate sales but, lets face it, 4K UHD isn't taking the world by storm. The releases are not huge and there is a cloud over them with many titles (particularly the early ones) being uprezed dupes. HDR is the feature that consumers can really see BUT they have to have the system that can take advantage of it. It sucks but I think this is just the state of the disc-based industry.  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 04-04-2018 10:50 AM                     Besides the latest 4K HDR releases, I've not used Blu-Ray players for a while now. Like many others, I've ripped it and made a DCP out of it. It's obviously a loss that OPPO is quitting this industry, but nevertheless a bit foreseeable. It has become a total niche market and not a very lucrative one. Still, is there any brand available right now that could take its place as a remote-controllable disc-based player? Furthermore, it would be great if Dolby/Doremi, GDC, Barco et all would step up their game and increase the compatibility of their playout solutions with more of the consumer formats out there, without the need to convert everything to a DCP first.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 04-04-2018 11:35 AM                     The ripping to DCP option only works for shows you have the time for. It isn't an instant process (though it isn't that complicated, it takes time to get it into DCP form and on the desired server(s). As for integrateable Blu-ray players, the Denon DT-500BD MK II comes to mind: http://denonpro.com/products/view3/dn-500bdmkii It has RS232 and Ethernet control, is only 1U tall and has analog outputs of all of the channels (save Atmos, of course). Its predecessor, before the MK2 had mixed reviews.  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 04-04-2018 12:16 PM                     I've looked at the rack mountable Denon player in the past and it seems the MK2 model is also missing 4K and HDR support. Besides the limited number of occasions where there really isn't time to create a DCP, the only remaining USP for us unfortunately. There's also the BDP-432 made by Newhank (also no 4K support there), which offers optional RS232 remote control support, but I've never seen a unit in action.  |  IP: Logged Scott Jentsch Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1061 From: New Berlin, WI, USA Registered: Apr 2003 posted 04-04-2018 12:42 PM                        It's too bad that Oppo has decided to give up on everything beside smartphones. When applying this to whether or not physical discs are dying, it's important to remember that they are also shutting down production of their high-end headphones and accessories, so this can be seen as a high-end manufacturer not wanting to sell to a high-end market any longer (not just a high-end disc-watching market). I think trying to sell a $549 disc player that does nothing else (no streaming media) was a mistake. I can imagine that it allowed them to keep from getting distracted by the vagaries of all the various streaming applications out there, but most people aren't looking for single-purpose devices. Especially single-purpose devices that cost as much or more than the TV they're connecting it to. I certainly hope that this isn't a bellwether for the state of physical media. I can attest to the appeal of the convenience of streaming media, but I don't want to see a day when I can't buy a movie that I really want to own. "Buying" a streaming version of a movie isn't buying, it's licensing it for display. It's compromised in both video and audio quality, as well as the dearth of extras. It's highly dependent upon all the ducks lining up in a row (internet connection, server uptime, etc.) Fortunately, there are other players that don't seem to be run-of-the-mill units. While my $50 LG 4K UHD Blu-ray player works just fine for my living room TV (and I suspect, a large majority of others with basic needs), I really wanted to pick up something like the Oppo 203 someday. That $549 price always scared me off, though. So now, it's a matter of figuring out if the Sony or Panasonic players are worth their money, or if it's better to just use the cheapest player out there that does the job (it is basically just a transport with an HDMI output, after all). The prices of the lower-end units allows one to pick up a media player to fill in the gaps. If they had run a sale and offered the 203 for $100 off, I would have bitten on that deal. I wonder how many others would have done the same. The fact that they didn't even try to adjust their pricing indicates that either their costs were so high that they couldn't lower the price, or that they wouldn't have stayed in the market no matter what.  |  IP: Logged Helmut Maripuu Film Handler Posts: 25 From: Västerås Västmanland Sweden Registered: Mar 2004 posted 04-04-2018 03:51 PM                     https://www.audioholics.com/blu-ray-and-dvd-player-reviews/lexicon-bd-30-blu-ray-oppo-clone/oppo-inside-lexicon-outside-1  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 04-04-2018 05:58 PM                     I suspect that they really did need to charge what they did to make the product viable. I also suspect that the players were the bulk of their products so if they aren't running the numbers that their manufacturing overhead becomes too high to handle the rest. I agree, losing the streaming services was probably a mistake. I do think they put their resources in the UDP-203/205 only to find that the market had shrunk too far and is continuing to shrink. I think, for their intended market, it wasn't a money thing. They were not after the low-end, "just need a player for my disc" crowd. A) there is no money in that and, B) the market is way too crowded. They were selling features and performance. As I said above, we had zero problems selling their players to our customers. Nobody balked at the price and most were repeat customers for the Oppos too. I bought one for my house to replace a failed Sony and I'll get one more before their all gone (for my home theatre).  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-05-2018 07:03 AM                        I could have seen them getting into high-rez audio formats, though. That is also a niche, but there is definitely a market for a high-end (well, "reasonable" high-end...not stupidly audiophile-level expensive) playback device there. And, honestly, $500-something for a 4k Blu-Ray player isn't that expensive for home use in relative terms. How much did everyone's first VCR cost?  |  IP: Logged Sam Graham AKA: "The Evil Sam Graham". Wackiness ensues. Posts: 1431 From: Waukee, IA Registered: Dec 2004 posted 04-05-2018 12:33 PM                        quote: Scott Norwood And, honestly, $500-something for a 4k Blu-Ray player isn't that expensive for home use in relative terms. It's quite a bit considering I paid $228 for my Sony UBP-X700 a couple of weeks ago The Sony supports Dolby Vision and damn near any audio format you can throw at it from traditional CD's to FLAC files. And it also has two HDMI outs, one audio only, just like the Oppo. it is sad to see Oppo exit the market, though.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 04-06-2018 07:46 AM                     Scott, The Oppo UDP-205 WAS geared for the high-end audio market. Look at its D/A converters. That is why it was over-double the price of the UDP-203. As for the Sony in comparison to the Oppo...where are the analog outputs? Where is the integration features like RS232? I suspect that Sony makes more per-unit off of the UBP-X700 than Oppo did off of the BDP-203 and they probably sell more of them. Then again, I suppose that Sony might have some issue selling a player for $228 that looks like a Walmart special at $50, features aside, of course.  |  IP: Logged Sam Graham AKA: "The Evil Sam Graham". Wackiness ensues. Posts: 1431 From: Waukee, IA Registered: Dec 2004 posted 04-06-2018 08:08 AM                        quote: Steve Guttag As for the Sony in comparison to the Oppo...where are the analog outputs? Where is the integration features like RS232? If you read my post again, you'll see the quote I was responding to was specific to being a "4k Blu-ray player".  |  IP: Logged

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