Originally Posted by Mark_H
My current choice is the Sony BDP-S550, which also seems to be the one Meridian were seen using at CES. It's cheap, it does all the internal decoding, and response time is fast.
Before the introduction of the Oppo BD-83 (due out in February or March), I was looking at the Sony S550 and the Panasonic BD55K. I recall reading that one of the advantages of the BD55K over the S550 was that the BD55K had frame by frame and slow fast forward and rewind. I may be mistaken about that but if that's an important consideration for you, you might want to do a little research on the issue. My reason for holding out for the BD-83 is that I want to have only one player in my system and my Toshiba XA2 has exceptionally good upscaling with it HQV Reon processor (I don't own any HD-DVDs). The Oppo will use the ABT chipset which is almost as good, and it plays DVD-As and SACDs as well, something the Sony and Panasonic do not. I don't have any DVD-As or SACDs, but I thought I might want to explore multi-channel recordings.

With the advent of the HD621, the Panasonic BD35K, which does not have analog outputs but is the same in all other respects as the BD55K, may be the ticket. The Sony S350 doesn't decode DTS-MA so I think it is out of the running. The Denon DVD-2500BDCI (no analog outputs) and the DVD-3800BDCI (with audio outputs and HQV Realta video processing for SD-DVDs) have gotten good reviews, but are only Blu-ray 1.1 compliant (i.e., no BD-Live) which may actually be a plus for some.

I don't know very much about the other Blu-ray players, as the ones mentioned above were the ones I focused on. I'm sure each has its advantages and disadvantages. The HD621 opens up lots of possibilities; the analog capabilities of Blu-ray players has become no longer an issue.

561, DSP5500s, DSP5000C, analog sides and rears