Oppo Players Get Sony TV Dolby Vision Update

Oppo UDP-203 4K UHD Player

Oppo UDP-205 4K UHD Player

Early in April 2018 Oppo revealed that they would be discontinuing the production of its UDP-203 and UDP-205 4K Blu-ray players, and stepping out of the player business permanently. This is a real blow to the entire AV world. The major concern, despite Oppo’s assurances, was wether they would continue to support these players with firmware upgrades. In particular, whether the players would ever receive the latest Dolby Vision profile, that is required to enable Dolby Vision playback on Sony’s Dolby Vision capable TV’s.

The issue that Oppo had to resolve was that when Sony added its Dolby Vision firmware to all its TV’s equipped with X1 Extreme chipsets, it turned out that external Dolby Vision capable sources like the Oppo 4K players required a separate update to correctly drive them.

In true Oppo style, they have been true to their word, and have finally delivered the long awaited firmware upgrade, making thousands of Oppo and Sony TV owners very happy.  Furthermore, Oppo are now allowing prospective customers who still desire to own one of these outstanding players to get in line for the final production runs of BOTH the 203 and 205 4K UHD players.

Software version 60-0601B  is now available as a Public Beta Version to allow its final testing before becoming the Official Release Version.

This update should provide the following Sony TV’s with fully functional Dolby Vision playback: X930E/XE9305, X940E/XE940, Z9D/ZD9, A1E/A1 OLED, A8F/AF8 OLED or X900F/XF900.

Here is a list of the additional functionality and options provided by this firmware upgrade:

1. Added the Dolby Vision “Player-led processing” mode for compatibility with recent Sony Dolby Vision TVs and firmware updates.
2. Added the “Dolby Vision” mode under the HDR Setting menu, which allows the player to convert the output to Dolby Vision when possible.
3. Added the “Dolby Vision Processing” setting under the HDR Setting menu. This setting allows customers to choose whether Dolby Vision processing is handled mainly by the TV or the UDP-20x player.
4. Added MQA support via the USB DAC In for the UDP-205 players.
5. Added the “Up-Sample DAC Input” setting under the Audio Processing menu for the UDP-205.
6. General fixes and disc compatibility improvements based on recent and upcoming UHD Blu-ray releases as well as user-submitted samples.

Lets us hope that this stellar support for new features, performance enhancements and bug fixes continues for at least the warranty life, and longer, for these outstanding players.

See my Oppo 203 Review here.