Guys:
Been around the Toshiba thread. Trying to get close to trigger. Been thinking about blu vs hd. Might be better with blu-ray, which might win out because of its capacity...who knows (beta died).

So....having read various threads on other forums I thought I would ask here. I would appreciate recommendations for which Blu-Ray is currently best bang for buck and best-featured, and least likely to be first to go obsolete. Thanks, as always

The Playstation 3 is the safest bet, honestly. By far the fastest loading, error-free, and future-proof BD device currently available.

Though owning both formats, I have yet to see Blu-ray's storage advantage be really taken advantage of over anything HD DVD has done.

The PS3 is the best bet from an obsolescence avoidance standpoint, but among the standalone players I've been pleased with my Panasonic BD30. It does have a couple limitations that are important to be aware of, mainly that it lacks onboard decoding for DD+, TrueHD, or DTS-HD. On the other hand, the player design is Profile 1.1 compatible (still needs a firmware update to enable it, I beleive, as does the PS3) and it will pass all of the new formats as a bitstream via HDMI v1.3.

In response to my request for info Gonk kindly wrote:

The PS3 is the best bet from an obsolescence avoidance standpoint, but among the standalone players I've been pleased with my Panasonic BD30

I don't want to get into gaming, and I think I'd like to stick to SONY unless there are some issues about which I don't know. Advice appreciated. TIA

The PS3 is Sony.

Thaks Bloggingitguy.

I know that, but I want a stand-alone, non-game-playing unit. Recommendations for other SONY appreciated.

Also I seem to remember some feature that PS3 doesn't have that a stand-alone unit would have.

That makes sense.

Sony's standalone players have not had the best track record to date, actually - I don't think they have any standalone players that I'd recommend considering.

The BDP-S1 that Sony released about a year ago (their original Blu-ray player) was late to market and lacked CD support. It's still available, I think, but it's hardly competitive. The S300 (Sony's entry-level standalone player, released in May or June) lacks decoding support for TrueHD even though it's very similar internally to the original S1 (which does support TrueHD decoding) - and even after five or six months on the market, there's no indication that the S300 will receive a firmware update to add TrueHD support. I believe that the S300 also lacks DD+ decoding, but I'd have to dig back through an old thread at AVS to be sure. the Since the S300 also lacks HDMI v1.3 support, you can't output a bitstream of any of the new formats. One theory proposed for this absence of TrueHD decoding is the arrival of the S500 a couple months ago, a more expensive player that does support TrueHD decoding but is otherwise not much different than the S300. Also, all of Sony's standalone players are still profile 1.0 (meaning no support for the sort of interactive content that HD-DVD has had since its inception). They are also quite a bit slower than the PS3 and Panasonic's BD30 at loading discs, especially the newer Disney and Pixar titles. What I've seen suggests that you can expect disc load times of up to three minutes or more for many of those discs on any of Sony's standalone players, as compared to 30 or 40 seconds for the PS3 and BD30.

The PS3 is missing a couple features that standalone Blu-ray players typically offer. The one that kept me from buying a PS3 as a BD player is the lack of a full-featured IR remote. The remote control sold for the PS3 is bluetooth, so its impossible to program into a standard universal remote. The old IR remotes used with the PS2 don't have all of the commands that the bluetooth remote does. That omission would have been a sure-fire ticket to poor SAF around here, plus it would have gotten on my nerves in short order (or a lot faster, if Kate decided to carry off the bluetooth remote). Also, the PS3 lacks a multichannel analog output. That didn't bother me so much, as my 7.1 Direct input is already dedicated to DVD-Audio and SACD - I'll settle for optical output from HD-DVD and Blu-ray until I upgrade my 990 in a year or so to something with HDMI v1.3 - but it can be a major issue for some people.

Honestly, Panasonic's BD30 is in many ways the BD player to beat at the moment. Samsung's 1400 is cheaper but seems more problem-prone, and only the PS3 is faster at loading discs (only barely, at that, from reports I've read). Sony really has had only one good-performing BD player so far, and that's the PS3.

Gonk:

Thank you very much for that extensive answer. It is much appreciagted.

Samsung 1400 appears today for $269 on Amazon and $299 at CC.