What's the Best Affordable Blu-ray Player With Streaming Video?

The PS3 is also a modern update to the old family slide projector and home movie projector - it does a good job at importing snapshots and home videos from your digital camera and intuitively organizing and displaying them, all on your TV without having to haul out a roll-up screen.

On top of that, it not only plays music CDs, but also imports and stores their songs, like a computer. Pop the CD in once, let the PS3 copy its contents and spit it out, and you have it available forever.

Still another feature is being able to rent or buy TV shows and movies separately or in addition to Netflix.

Yet another is free audio chat and even video phone calls (with an optional camera attachment) with other PS3 users, so you can do Star Trek style big screen video phone calls with family far away, as long as they also have a PS3 and the PS Eye.

Still another is being able to surf the web, using a standard keyboard and mouse, or a special wireless one sold by Logitech. You can even attach a printer to print out web pages.

All that's without even mentioning games.

The PS3 really is the perfect centerpiece to a home theater system.

Anything made by Best Buy like their Insignia brand usually stinks. I allowed myself to get suckered into buying an Insignia TV 32" for a "great" price that was, "as good as a Sony". It was for my daughter's dorm room so I figured what the heck and bought it. What a mistake. In less than 3 months the sound went, I had to retrieve it and exchange it and it was a real pain in the neck. I licked my wounds and paid the $150 difference and got the real Sony that I should have bought in the first place and was sadly the wiser for my stupidity. Plus, you always need to be wary of Best Buy's "power pricing" scam that usually not even their sales people know about. That's how they sucker you into the place with their special version of the old bait and switch. They send you these great coupons to get you into the store and once there are told that the coupons don't apply to their items that are "power priced" meaning anything that's actually good so you have to buy their junk to get the discount. They claim their power pricing is the rock bottom lowest an item can be and therefore the coupons don't apply. What a crock. I never shop there for anything significant unless it's a DVD or some other small item. I wrote to complain about this and got one phone call but they never followed up and have since lost me as a regular customer. Word to the wise...avoid Best Buy at all costs and especially any of their in store brands like Insignia

The PS3 slim is obviously the version the article refers to. Older model PS3's (like the one I have) cannot bitstream hd audio sources.

Cd's and dvd's are still in the dark ages..What we need is put all movies and cd's on a mb card. and build a mb machine that can play and burn mb card to mb card. I'm talking about the same mb card that a ps3 has. as small as that. and go even to a smaller mb size for your mp3 the size of a postage stamp to fit in your mp3 player. No more downloading music all you do is buy a postage stamp size mb card with the music already on it for your mp3 and your ready to go. It's time for newer technology and get rid of cd's and dvd's once and for all.

this guys right on the money about the ps3. but i also had an insignia in my bedroom and the damndest thing happened to it. my wife and i were watching a movie one night and our cat walked across the remote and the damn thing made a loud pop and never worked again. not the remote but the player itself. my little buddy must have somehow hit the self destruct code !

The superior picture quality of Blu-ray is worth the cost with a decent 40" or larger display , and the superior audio is more than worth it over the outdated dvd audio codecs and online movies with the picture and current audio quality of Blu-ray are at least 10 years away if in fact we ever get both via online sources.

Best Buy screwed me out of partial refund with their "restocking" fee. I returned a printer/scanner that wouldn't even turn on. They tried, their "geek squad experts" tried. Nothing. It was a manufacture screw up, and they said they wouldn't be putting it back on the shelf. There was no other model in my price range with the same features, so I wasn't going to buy another. They STILL insisted on company policy of charging a 15% restocking fee, and charged me $74.

I will NEVER shot Best Buy again!

We went to C.B. Joes and bought a 50" Plasma LG and got the LG 1000 - watt Blu-Ray with it. Love both of them. The LG Blu-Ray has everything, Netflix, Pics.,music,ect. just recently watched Journey to the center of the Earth in 3-D. That was great. It even has a dock for our I-Pod.
Good luck with what ever you get.

I am an installer and this guy is on point with the PS3 as a key component to any home theater. As far as Best Buy .......Utilize the internet and save money on the equipment and installation and save THOUSANDS.

I bought a blue ray player panasonic to go with our 50 inch panasonic plasma..Now some of the blue ray movies say that some players need to have an update from the blue ray manufacturor. I have called twice panasonic for it, and am still waiting..Without this player is just average as any other player..Totally disappointed

This article gave the worst possible advice imaginable. Stay FAR, FAR away from ANYTHING Insignia related, I once bought an Insignia HDTV that broke down a month after the 12 month warranty. I called a tv repairman and he said he couldn't in good conscience fix the tv and that I might as well buy a better brand tv.

Also, my PS3 very inconsistently plays Blu-Ray movies and even PS3 games. It skips, freezes, and gets disc read errors for no apparent reason. If that sounds like a good investment to you, by all means. At least you won't get bent over and drilled as hard as I did when I paid $600 originally for mine...

I have an original 60GB from when it came out and it's been very good to me. you people must be abusing it, leaving it in an area where it gets too hot, or tossing it around. it is a solid piece with a less than 2% failure rate.

We have a PS3 and a 50 inch Panasonic monitor. Blu-Ray DVD'slook great, but we wanted to avoid the hasle of dropping off the DVD at the rental store. We decided to take advantage of the free trial period from Netflix for streaming movies. However, after receiving the install CD, which we need to load EACH TIME we want to downoad a movie, we became very diappointed with the small selection of HD movies available on Netflix. The inventory is miniscule - there are 100 movies listed in each category (Action, Romance, Indy,etc) but many of the movies are listed in several categories. And there is not a large number of recently released movies. Down-loading was slow, and some movies that were listed as HD were not. We cancelled our service after 2 weeks. Until Netflix has a larger catalog, we'll go the old route and rent a Blu-Ray DVD.

wish they'd start manufacturing HD DVR's - - not the DVR boxes the providers give you , but the ones that use your own discs and connect to cable and sattelite inputs - like the VCR's were like , but these will be HD and use discs -