| Re: What is the best Blu-ray player available now?
Certainly from everything I've read, the PS3 is the best *functioning* Blu-Ray player available. Having a massively-powerful processor on board means that transitions, pauses, etc are all kept to a minimum... one hi-fi magazine said that the other stand-alone players were dinosaurs in comparison.
For quality, I'm not sure there's a huge difference between them, but I have heard the PS3 can have some issues with copy protected material and bitstreaming (I'm not sure what, so you might need to Google it). The PS3 is also region-locked for both Blu-Ray AND regular DVDs, and I haven't heard of an unlocking service as yet.
One thing that did annoy me: it won't play SACDs through optical-out, which may be related to the copy-protection thing. HDMI is okay though, I believe.
The PS3 looks pretty neat, but definitely doesn't fit in with my other hi-fi gear. And make sure you budget for the remote as well. I tried using the controller but finally relented last week and bought the remote -- so much easier.
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