There is a whole thread devoted to what this is at AVS, but I'll try to sum up:
There is already a beta test team. They have been testing for a while. Oppo most likely wants to open up to a small group of people outside the beta team to get real world testing on configurations that Oppo and the Beta test group may not have.
The EAP participants will not be bound by an NDA like the Beta testers are, and it has been heavily hinted at that the beta testers will still be under NDA and will be getting test firmwares in advance/different than those in the EAP.
It is kind of like a public beta. You pay for the hardware, and you get access to the 'OS' for testing early. After the player is fully publicly released, the EAP members can return the player for a full refund. If they decide they like the feature set, then they can keep it, and have already paid for it. The warranty is also supposed to cover to one year after the full public release, so if it takes one month from EAP to release, those EAP people get a 13 month warranty.
It is certainly an interesting way of doing it. Some of their previous players got out of beta with no known bugs, only to have some show up when it got into the hands of end users with slightly different equipment than any of the beta testers had. I think Oppo is trying to reduce the possibility of that happening with this player.
The price is not bad either. It includes on-board SACD playback with DSD D/A convertors, bitstreaming of just about anything, on-board decoding of just about anything, and a really nice upscaling solution for standard DVDs. Maybe that feature set isn't something that some would care about, but for those that want all those features, the next available player is something like $2000.
According to their notices, the only thing missing right now is DVD-Audio playback, which many people waiting for this want. Everything else seems to be in place, but it may still be buggy. So the EAP is there to help find and isolate the bugs that are left.
I don't blame you if you don't like the pricepoint or the methods they are using. But just because it isn't the right player for you doesn't make it any less valid for those of us that have been waiting for it as it covers all of our bases.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Shawn Parr @ Feb 25th 2009 9:41AM
There is a whole thread devoted to what this is at AVS, but I'll try to sum up:
There is already a beta test team. They have been testing for a while. Oppo most likely wants to open up to a small group of people outside the beta team to get real world testing on configurations that Oppo and the Beta test group may not have.
The EAP participants will not be bound by an NDA like the Beta testers are, and it has been heavily hinted at that the beta testers will still be under NDA and will be getting test firmwares in advance/different than those in the EAP.
It is kind of like a public beta. You pay for the hardware, and you get access to the 'OS' for testing early. After the player is fully publicly released, the EAP members can return the player for a full refund. If they decide they like the feature set, then they can keep it, and have already paid for it. The warranty is also supposed to cover to one year after the full public release, so if it takes one month from EAP to release, those EAP people get a 13 month warranty.
It is certainly an interesting way of doing it. Some of their previous players got out of beta with no known bugs, only to have some show up when it got into the hands of end users with slightly different equipment than any of the beta testers had. I think Oppo is trying to reduce the possibility of that happening with this player.
The price is not bad either. It includes on-board SACD playback with DSD D/A convertors, bitstreaming of just about anything, on-board decoding of just about anything, and a really nice upscaling solution for standard DVDs. Maybe that feature set isn't something that some would care about, but for those that want all those features, the next available player is something like $2000.
According to their notices, the only thing missing right now is DVD-Audio playback, which many people waiting for this want. Everything else seems to be in place, but it may still be buggy. So the EAP is there to help find and isolate the bugs that are left.
I don't blame you if you don't like the pricepoint or the methods they are using. But just because it isn't the right player for you doesn't make it any less valid for those of us that have been waiting for it as it covers all of our bases.