What’s up everybody! Channa D. here, and we are going to take an in depth look at the Oppo UDP-203 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player.
So, it is now the end of April and I’ve had this Oppo 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player since mid-January so I’ve had a few months to check it out and actually go through all the options and see what’s up. There are some options I still don’t understand and there’s a whole lot that’s cool and most of the time I’m just playing stuffs in auto. I do put things on source direct when I just want to have the source of the disc and nothing else, no processing. So, settle in, this is a long video, this is going to be great if you guys are thinking about buying one. It’s pretty awesome and I’m loving it so far. Alright, let’s get into it.
Okay, I’ve got the remote, going through with the Oppo UDP-203 pressing power right now. It’s taking us to the home menu and right away loading up the disc that’s in there and here we are. So, that’s not bad as far as load time goes, I think it’s about 20 seconds. Alright. So, let’s go back out to the home screen to take a look at that. I do love this remote, this remote is awesome, it glows in the dark. My wife likes it, she’s wondering why no other remotes that we have do that. Let’s just keep that there and go to the home screen.
Now as you can see, it has a really nice aesthetic. We’ve got seven options on the bottom there. From left to right we have Blu-ray disc which is to play the disc in there. We have Music, and we go back to scene, it changes. Photos, Movies, now Music, Photos and Movies are for playing on a different device like a USB card or a hard drive if you have that connected. Network, Set up, ah that Picture looks nice, and Favorite. Alright. So, let’s go into the setup section here, and so Auto Play Mode is on, Auto Resume is on, this is all a bit basic stuffs. On-Screen Display normal, Angle Mark and Parental Controls off. Let’s go back. Video Output Setup, Picture Adjustment, you can adjust the picture directly from the Oppo as it is sending the signal to your TV or receiver. I don’t mess with that and you don’t need to. I have heard of people using projectors using this to adjust the picture because they are already know that they have jack up the brightness and contrast for their project room so if you have a projector maybe you’ll use those. HDR setting: now, the HDR is set to auto. Having the HDR on auto is fine. You don’t want it to be on forced and you don’t want to turn it off. Regular movie viewing, especially 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray’s are all going to have HDR so you’ll just want it to send the HDR signal. Now, Strip Metadata is an interesting option, as it says right there, it strips off HDR metadata but preserves color gamut. Why would you want to do this? So, currently in some of the 4K projectors, the HDR isn’t that great as far as the amount of nits that the projector can produce. And we all know projector rooms have to be super dark so being able to produce 1000 nits is kind of hard for the projector to do. So, when you want to remove the HDR metadata but keep all the wreck 2020 color gamut, you’ll still benefit from the color but you are just taking away the HDR. So, this is a great option if you’re using this with the projector.
Let’s go back. Now Target Luminance, you are going to actually set the nits, you are going to actually set the nits of the TV or display or projector that you’re using and it goes all the way up to 1600. Now, my LG is 6O LED, it’s somewhere between 650 and 700 since there is no 650, I’m going with 700, and that will get you even more accurate HDR picture. Alright. Output Resolution: I have this on source direct right now which means there will be no upscaling. If it’s a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, then it’s not going to upscale. However, if I toss in a 1080P Blu-ray, it’ll keep at 1080P and then the TV can do the upscaling itself. If you want to keep it on auto, then you won’t have to deal with that, it’ll automatically upscale to 1080P and you won’t have to come back here to the setup menu. For most people, auto is fine. I’ll just keep it on source direct. I will show you what a 1080P Blu-ray looks like up scaled by the Oppo. Custom Resolution: I keep it on UHD auto. There’s no reason really to change it from that. Color Space and Color Depth are two really broad topics and you could talk about it for a long time but just know that when you are playing a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, all the information, Color Space wise is saved in 4.2.0 and your Blu-ray player will process it to 4.4.4, it’ll then send it to your 4KUltra HD TV. So, Color Space is great to just keep it on auto if you don’t understand. I don’t really understand it so I’ll just keep it on auto. Color Depth: now, here you can choose the bit depth of your color depending upon the panel you have. Everything right now is pretty much 10 bit. Until we get into 12 bit panels, you won’t really need to change this so keeping it on auto is just fine. Here you can change the aspect ratio. Here we are, 3D settings: I keep it on auto. I did test out 3D with this player, it looks kind of weird, I’m not sure if I can watch a movie with it but the passengers ultra-high-definition 4K disc does come with a 3D Blu-ray copy. De-interlaced mode: I just keep it on auto. I don’t really want to mess with that. Alright, let’s go back. Audio Processing Setup: Secondary Audio off. When you put in a 4k Ultra HD disc, usually it just defaults to Dolby ATMOS or DTS:X, whichever one is the best so you don’t want to have like secondary audio track coming in there. If you wanted to set this up for Dolby ATMOS and DTS:X, put this on Bitstream or just keep on auto. For S/PDIF out, you have some choices here 48K LPCM all the way up to 192K LPCM Bitstream Dolby Digital and DTS. DVD audio mode: I don’t know what that does. SACD priority for multichannel: I do have an SACD and it’s this jazz one and it’s a hybrid CD so if you put into regular CD player it’ll play like regular CDs but if you put it into this, it has a 5.1 track which is really cool because all the instruments are separated out and stuff like that. Okay. Let’s see CD output. I keep this on auto, and I don’t have any settings for the A/V sync but if you like to change it you can. Okay, under audio processing, we’ve got a variable output volume. You can actually change the volume up and down. I’ll show you that in a little bit once we get going here. Power on volume: it’ll be the last save volume from last time you watched a movie. Maximum volume at 100, yea, there is it. Dynamic Range Control is on auto. Filter Characteristics: I have no idea what that is so I just kind of left it on whatever it was. Now, speaker configuration: if you wanted to use the pre-outs on the back of this Oppo player to plug-in directly so you can do that all in here, this player will decode Dolby True HD 7.1 and I believe DTS Master Audio 7.1, but it will not decode ATMOS or DTS:X in the player itself, it has to Bitstream that to an A/V receiver.
Alright. Here, this is just like the same stuffs in your A/V receiver, you can set the crossovers for your speakers if you’re doing a pre-outs this way. DTS Neo 6 Mode, if you want to put this specifics Surround Sound processing on, you are entitled to do so. And here in the device setups we have their firmware information, the upgrade, the code for the remote. HDMI CEC: that’s to control the player via HDMI with your like TV remote or whatever. You change the brightness here from standard to dim to off, I just turn it off, it’s off. I’m going to put it back on standard. And I’m not really going into this much on so I want to just check for firmware update. As you can see here, it’s got more options for you to mess around with if you like. Network Setup is kind of the same, I don’t really mess around with it. If you want to, you can do run a connection test. I don’t really see the points. Alright. So, let’s get out of here and if you are on a network. Now, this is if you have any kind of network media server or anything set up. My Denon AVR shows up. I’m not sure what it’s on there, I don’t think anything’s on there but it just shows up.
Alright. So, let me do this, let me time the start up or load up time for this disc. I’m going to hit play and if it starts at the same time, one, two, here we go. As soon as we see the text on the screen, that’s how long it takes to start up. Oh, so 10 seconds, maybe 10.5 seconds. So, this remote control is pretty robust. Now, if I wanted to let’s say so let’s take a look at the remote: we have power button, we have input. Now you’re asking about input, why input? Here is a what pop up when you press input, it’s Blu-ray player, HDMI IN, or ARC HDMI OUT. And this does have an HDMI input, it is not a 4K pass through input, it is just a 1080P input and there is no upscaling that happens on that input, just if you are curious, that’s how that works. Open is open, pure audio is kind of funny, it’s just the audio. You see that, I pressed pure audio and it just turns off every video aspect, the audio still playing and the front of the Oppo players also blank. I’m not going to show you that right now, you’ll just take my word for it. I don’t have a third camera, so sorry. Press it again and it’s back on. Then, we have volume up and down. Now, this does not change the volume that’s going out of the HDMI. I would imagine this is the volume. If you were using the pre-outs on the back of the player to go to amplifiers, this is your volume control right here. However, it does mute. This is the mute button, when you press mute, no matter what audio connection you’re using, it will mute the audio. Okay. Here’s the home screen where you did that page up and page down buttons. Info is great, press info, you get a whole bunch of stuffs, you get to look down at the bottom right HEVC, that’s the codec, it’s a BED movie and it tells you what’s going on the left. English Dolby Digital Stereo 48K. Then you have chapters and titles up top. So, let’s actually hit play all on this right now and see how this remote works.
Okay. So, now let’s see the info and now we’ve got chapter time scrolling on there now. We have pop-up menu that brings up the menu from the disk. Here we have top menu, if I hit that this goes back I believe the front of the disc. Yep! Okay. now lets the go back into play all. Now, this is a great feature here and this is why like having the buttons. Here’s a go-to button so when you hit go-to, you’ll get a little cursor at the top of the screen there, and let say I want to go to 10 minutes in; 1, 0 and enter on the remote, and guess? We are 10 minutes in. How great is that! Let’s go a little further, let’s go 15 minutes in. I don’t want to watch these guys here, let’s watch some other guys. Oh, it isn’t that cute or scary, I don’t know. I’m going to check out the option menu. Now, we have Subtitle Adjustment, Subtitle Setting, you can do all these. So, let’s turn on the subtitles, okay, you can see the subtitles going on there at the bottom. Now, if you’ve got a subtitle adjustment we can change the color of the subtitle, there’s red, there’s white, there’s blue, there’s green, and then there’s outline color, if you want to change that, not as many choices. Size, that’s kind of cool, we can get it bigger, you know. Position, you can change that if you want it in the middle of the screen, there you go. Sync obviously, that’s if something is wrong, and let’s go back to defaults because we don’t want all that nonsense that’s going on. Okay, let’s go ahead and turn the subtitles off. Okay, let’s go fast forward, I don’t want to see these guys anymore. Okay, back to the option menu, we’ve got audio setting, that’s the only one so that’s it. Let’s go back. Picture Adjustment: this is the same menu as it was in the setup menu. A/V Sync: if something’s off, you can adjust it here directly. Zoom: I don’t think I can change that; no. Repeat is to repeat functions. 3D is to turn on 3D. If there’s no 3D, it’s not going to happen. Angle: if this thing has multiple angles, then you can change it. Picture-In-Pictures, same deal. SAP, same deal. If you don’t have it and if this doesn’t support it, then it’s not happening.
Okay. So, let’s hit stop. Now if you can see on the remote here, these red, green, blue and yellow buttons, they don’t do anything, and you’ve got the transport controls down here: stop, play, pause, rewind, previous chapter, next chapter, rewind and fast forward. Now, just like in the option menu, these audio, subtitles, zoom, this dimmer button here is for the front of the Oppo, we can turn it off, it’s off, it’s got a bright, it’s got a dim, and it’s got an off, settings, that’s for the LED display and the blue LED above the power button. So, let’s turn that back on. Setup: we go back into the setup so you don’t have to go to the home screen to do that. A/V replace is kind of cool, you hit A. Let’s try it. Alright. So, let’s hit play all again and then do this A/V replay. Alright. So, let’s let say you like this, you hit it and you’ll see A, and then you want to stop it, you hit B and now, it’ll just play that section over and over. Okay. Press it again and it turns off. There’s a repeat function and that’s for chapter repeats. Picture: that’s another dedicated button for the same picture adjustment that was in the setup menu. We have a resolution button down her, I have it on source directly so you can change it mid-viewing if you like, it will take it’s time to do whatever it needs to do to change it. Boom! And now it’s on auto, Custom UHD Auto. Okay. Oh, no, no, let’s just leave it there. Okay. Then this one is HDR. HDR settings is on auto. What do I do? Put it on Forced or something like that? Yea, Forced. So, let’s go back to auto.
Alright. So, let’s go to home and let’s check out what we have as far as compatibility with what I got on the memory stick. So, let’s go to music, and I have a Patriot memory stick in the front USB. Now, the front USB is the USB 2.0 and the two USB ports in the back are USB 3.0. I’m not sure why they did that but that’s what it is. So, let’s play Sade first, it’s got a great display for the menus here and once the song actually starts playing, I don’t have any audio running because I don’t want to get hit with copyright. If it the artwork is right, it will show on the left, it shows you the title, shows the track number. On the rights it’s got the title, artist, album, genre, date, track number and then you got like a transport like where you are, current time, remaining time. Alright. Let’s go out of that. Now, let’s go to the Adele CD and you can see what it looks like when it has the artwork in the file. Boom! There’s Adele and her face “hello.” And these are all flat files, you are able to play MP3s and WAVs as well. Alright. So now, let’s go over to the next, let’s go hit the home button again and let’s go over to photos. Now, I don’t really have too many photos here but I do have the one photo from the Adele file, and here it is, there it is. Okay. Now, we could do all that or we can just hit home and get back to our menu systems. So, let’s check out movies. Here I have a few different file types for you guys so let’s start with the MP4. I’m just going to fast forward it a little bit. Oh, resume from say position? Yea, I’ll go for it. Here it is and this is Dark Shadows MP4. I just hit the info button and this is coming into my Denon stereo because that’s the track that it’s showing. It’s using AVC compression. Okay, let’s get out of this. To get out of it, you have to press stop for all these files and you can press return or back. Alright, let’s check out Kubo and the Two Strings> Boom! Info. Now, this has a Dolby Digital track so I’m Seeing Dolby Digital on my Denon AVR and you get all the regular stuff there. It is an MPEG-4 movie. So, I’ll stop that and go back and that was the AVI and then we have office Christmas party and MKV so let’s see, let’s see the Info; Dolby Digital 48K is thee audio, it’s an AVC movie. I’ll say stop. I believe you can find out the resolution by hitting info, yea, there it is, info so run time down the bottom is 1 hour 45 minutes and 23 seconds, it’s 1912 x 796 resolution. Let’s check out Kubo and the Two String; looks like that it’s runtime is 1 hour 41 minutes and 35 seconds, 720 x 304. And Dark Shadows is 1 hour 53 minutes 5 seconds with actual 1080P resolution. It just has that stereo audio tracks. Alright. So, that’s that little play, those three file types. So, that’s it for now, all I need to do is put in let’s say a CD so I will be right back.
Alright. So, here’s SACD and this is really cool, it does have a 5.1 track. Now, I know with my Denon I can just put on like five channel stereo or seven sound stereo but this is actually like instruments are coming out of different channels on purpose. That is just like a stereo that they just turn on all the channels with. This is actually really cool. I was hearing the drums in the fronts, piano up fronts, I’m getting percussion in this in the surround sound speakers, I hear some piano on surround sound speakers, hear some symbols and stuffs in the front then it kind of moves its way back around. It’s really cool. I did find SACD of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in 5.1 and I hear it’s pretty awesome because of all of the sound effects, and why not? So, I might pick that up and do a review of that. If you’ve get a Blu-ray player like this Oppo or anything else that’ll play SACD and you’ve got a 5.1 surround sound system, definitely something cool to check out if you like to listen to music.
Anyway, that’s that. Alright. Wasn’t that cool? Whole lot of stuffs you can do with this 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player. Now, most of my subscribers know I did just get a Sony X-800 and I’m also going through that but I figured I should do a review on the Oppo 203 first because I’ve owned it for longer and have a better idea of what it can do. Now, first thing first, the remote control on the Oppo is insane. It’s got so much, it lights up, it’s really cool and as far as all the functions on here, it’s too much for me but I got it because it was the only really good player, the other one was a Samsung 8500 I think, the K-8500, which they have a new one the K-9500 or the M-9500, whatever. Anyway, it’s on its way here so I’m going to be checking that out for you guys as well. So, I figured I do this review first because I’ve had this player for longer and if you’re in the market for 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player, you should definitely subscribe because I will be posting the videos about all of the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray players I can get my hands on. I say this is a great player. If you’re planning on going to a projector, this is probably the only player to get when you step up to the $550 range, you do get a lot more for your money and it’s pretty quality, did you see the menus? Oh men! Did you see the menus in the Sony video I did? Horrible, horrible. The one downside of this player that people are always going to shout about is the lack of 4K streaming apps, and really it doesn’t matter. I already have a 4KUltra HD TV which has all the streaming apps. I get voodoo with streaming in Dolby vision, I get Netflix streaming in Dolby vision, what else, Amazon in 4K which I don’t really use but it’s there, it’s already on the TV, I don’t really need in the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player. Also if I really needed apps, I can always go to my Xbox One S, they have 4K streaming and a lot more apps like HBO GO and Showtime, Anytime and all kinds of apps like that my wife and I like to use.
So, for its price point I know it’s kind of steep but this is the player to get I believe there is a Panasonic player that is around $700, and from a scientific comparison, from the video I’ve seen, it edges out the Oppo in picture quality like by that much. So, if you want to try something a little bit better and I’m talking about like that much better than the Oppo, check out the Panasonic and I’ll put the link in the description, I don’t know the model off the top my head but it is like the only one that’s up to $700. Will Oppo come out with a flagship 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player? I hope so. Will I have enough money to buy it? Probably not. Now, we are still waiting for the firmware update that’s going to add Dolby vision to the Oppo 203 and that’s really exciting feature. As far as I know, the only 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player that has Dolby vision is the LG player that’s also 299. I may get my hands on it, I may not because I hear it’s not so good, so do I need to make a review video about something that’s not good? I don’t know, we’ll see. Don’t forget to follow my twitter account because I will be putting some of these things up for sale if I can’t return them.
So, that pretty much wraps it up, Once again my name is Channa D. and I’ll see you next time.