Oppo BDP-103D Blu-ray Player with Darbee Visual Processing

We made it over to the Darbee Visual Processing booth with the Oppo BDP-103D. The 'D' of course stands for Darbee Visual Processing. It will ship for $600, a $100 premium price over Oppo's BDP-103 player. Darbee is a brand new video processing system. What you have with Darbee (and this player) is a new way of processing video. So the BDP-103D will have three chips. It has a MediaTek chipset that handles deinterlacing and upconversion as well as basic video processing. Next is the Darbee processor that takes care of luminance-based processing to add more depth. It works similar to drop shadow effects that makes a 2D image appear more 3D without having to deal with actual 3D processing.

It's a new way of processing that's hard to explain because nobody's done before. It's a bit difficult to see on the show floor since you can dial it from 0 to 120% but it's likely, in the home, going to be set somewhere around 30 to 35%. Oppo is implementing it fully and so you'll be able to dial it up or down as desired for the effect you want. If you turn it up too much you'll start to see artifacts, but with moderate use it looks pretty awesome.

The BDP-103D doesn't lose anything. It still has 4K upconversion via the Silicon Image chipset so again, that's at the final stage after Darbee does its processing, The interesting thing is that Oppo does the Darbee conversion at 1080p. They checked all the other resolutions and found that 1080p was the sweet spot where there wasn't a lot of introduced artifacting.

You're going to start seeing Darby visual processing in a lot of products over the next few years. You can already get it in an outboard box where you feed it HDMI in and take an HDMI out with the processed video. So you don't have to have manufacturers buying into it just yet in order to experience it. You can get the outboard box and the system does all the processing in real-time.

The Oppo BDP-103D is going to be out around mid-October of this year (2013).

Unless otherwise indicated, this is a preview article for the featured product. A formal review may or may not follow in the future.