It shouldn’t be a surprise then to learn that Oppo’s new Blu-ray player was teased on Twitter before any traditional services. There’s not much information in the tweet, Oppo simply states “We will be announcing a lower-cost Blu-ray player in early January 2010. Visit www.oppodigital.com around that time to learn more.”  When a company that specializes in Blu-ray players says that they’ll be announcing something in early January, it’s nearly guaranteed that they mean CES.  

As far as lower-cost goes, there’s a lot of room for interpretation.  The Oppo BDP-83 isn’t exactly an entry level player, but the $500 price tag does mark the sweet spot for a lot of people.  There’s a lot of wiggle room under that price range, and there is a large group of customers that Oppo hasn’t reached yet.

The success and positive reception of the BDP-83 will be hard to match, and Oppo is certainly pressured to do so.  Lowering the price of course means eliminating a few features, though we’ll have to wait to see what they are.

The most likely scenario seems to be the scaling back of some of the more niche audio features to make a dedicated Blu-ray player.  SACD and DVD-Audio support for example, are nice but unnecessary features.  Whatever the case, we’ll find out more in just a few short weeks.