Presumably Oppo makes a nice dollar or two out of selling the guts of Oppo BDP-83 Blu-ray players to Lexicon, to which the latter affixes aluminium fronts and backs and resells for seven times as much as the BDP-83.
But yesterday when I asked Jez Ford from Sound and Image magazine whether he’d like a review of Oppo’s BDP-80, he made an interesting point in agreeing. He said that Oppo ‘is now a brand of some reputation after the Lexicon debacle’.
Home theatre geeks have long known about how good Oppo products are, but we are a small market. Reputation performs an important role in the market: it provides information to those who are not the ‘geeks’ in that area, who have to take other people’s words for how good or bad something is. If a brand which is universally regarded as high end, has been around for nearly forty years, and which sells all its products for ridiculously high prices, says that a product made by Brand X is good enough for them, that has to help Brand X’s rep.
But how can you market that? Somehow I don’t think we’ll see advertisements from Oppo saying: ‘The Oppo BDP-83, the core of the competition!’
Note: I have a BDP-83 on long term loan, and I still think it is the best player on the market.