The Samsung player is still the fastest while the Oppo is about on a par with an Xbox One S when it comes to loading times. The BDP-203's operating speed is squarely middle-of-the-road. One thing to be aware of is that you can't use your Oppo remote to control the unit - you'll still need your Roku remote or smartphone app. We next tried plugging a Chromecast Ultra and a Roku Express into its HDMI port, and both worked fine. We'll wait until more discs are released to render judgement as to whether that format improves on the image quality of existing HDR10 discs.
Meanwhile the Oppo correctly rendered the scene with the colors and HDR highlights, and indicators on the LG TV proved that it was indeed in Dolby Vision.
We're guessing Microsoft will patch that issue once more Dolby Vision discs hit the market.
While a non-Dolby Vision player such as the Xbox One S is supposed to render the content correctly in HDR10, the Xbox overexposed the snow-filled opening, sapping it of color and contrast. This is not the case with all HDR though - putting one of the only Dolby Vision discs available now (Despicable Me 2) in both players showed an immediate disparity. If there is a difference with 4K performance between the Xbox and the Oppo during standard 4K (and HDR), it's something we have yet to see. The Martian wasn't giving up its secrets either, with both players picking out the highlights as the sun hits the reflectors (21:56) and demonstrating a lack of banding in the dust-filled sky above. Likewise both players dealt with the moody palettes of both Arrival and John Wick 2 with the latter bursting with neon highlights when the scene called for it. The only differences we saw were when we deliberately turned off HDR on the LG panel which lead to a much less vivid performance. The episode tracks a three-toed sloth as it navigates the waters off the coast of Panama, both players performed almost identically to each other with colors looking lush and verdant, from the greens of the jungle to the cyans of the tropical waters. We tested with two very similar TVs - the Sony XBR-A1E and the LG OLED65E7P - and swapped players between them to eliminate the differences in the panels. We used the first episode "Islands" to see if we could coax out differences in color or HDR. As a result we are still nailing down our testing methodology, but we watched as much content as we could on the Oppo UDP-203, including the excellent Planet Earth II disc. While the format is now 12 months old there are still competing standards (with Dolby Vision the latest) and a lack of standardized test discs. When it comes to playing back 4K Blu-rays it's still a bit of a WIld West out there, though. There was a distinct lack of jaggies or "chugginess" as the camera pans over the houses of the utopian village. Likewise, when playing DVD content the player offered an excellently smooth performance with the opening sequence of Star Trek Insurrection.
The player managed to pass our real world 1080p test discs - the Nine Inch Nails concert film and Mission Impossible III - without any incident.