I bought a refurb Blu Ray player for 262 bucks shipped and including tax. The finish looked great and it performed really well except that it skipped on some Blu Ray discs and just about every CD I tried. No big deal, it's the chance you take on a refurb. So I call up to arrange to return it and have it exchanged. No can do. I had to pay for the return shipping and reorder the product which had incurred a price increase and I couldn't get the price that I paid originally. The customer rep couldn't understand why I didn't bother reordering.

So as soon as my credit card gets credited back I'm going to go buy a different player.

Probably not a company I would do business with.

Thanks for the warning about this company.

Good old Sony. At least I'm only out 16 bucks for shipping.

You can get a PS3 for $299 if you buy the 40 gig version and put it on a sony credit card that you open up (you will get a $100 credit on the card when you do this). You might want to check to see if they still have this offer. But, this is what I did at the end of January and it worked fine.

- Nick

Highly recommend PS3. I have mine as the media hub.
I bought the 60GB version from sonystyle. They had $150 credit on first purchase, free shipping, free extra controller and got 8 points per dollar and it works awesome.
Love the Bluray on my 46XBR2. Somehow normal DVDs look very good when played on PS3.

-- Avi

This may be a silly reason to you guys for not getting the PS3, but if I get it I will buy a bunch of games for it too and I have a Wii that I enjoy and don't want to have 2 game systems.
But at that price it is a very compelling solution.

not to mention they are about to release firmware that will make the PS3 a Profile 2.0 player which will enable BD-Live
also included is "Resume play" which should have been there from the start.

Lampshade -> I understand the logic and actually fought the PS3 for awhile based on that too, but if you do enjoy gaming, you will find that the quality of games on the PS3 is out of this world compared to the Wii. The Wii has basically become a "Wii Sports" only machine for parties.

The PS3 is by far and away my gaming machine of choice in what little time I have to play games... sound/graphics are excellent, not to mention networked music/video streaming over your home network, which was a huge added plus I hadn't counted on. It is an amazing machine for the price.

You can now stream media through the Wii as well, through a software package and I have found the Wii to be getting some decent games as of late, I actually like the Wii controls better for some games, I guess I am not a true gamer.

Got my PS3 about 10 days ago and I don't/probably won't own any games for it. It is a robust media server that also stores/streams DVDs and a BluRay player.

Got it using the Sony Card process mentioned above and for $299, it's a no brainer.

Really? Cool, which software makes that work? As far as being a true gamer... I own one game for the PS3... so, I'm pretty sure I don't qualify either. The one game I own, I love though. Assasin's Creed, amazing video. But, I digress...

Here is an article for one way to do it. and then there is Xoom. I have never tried either nor seen it work. I just use my Denon for any music and I am just not into streaming video to watch on my TV. Anything I watch that is streamed I just do so on the 22" computer monitor

Another option PS3 has is to install another OS. I have linux running on it. So one can use the PS3 as a computer too. I am yet to allow the PS3 processor to be used for research, but there is the choice to allow research institutes to use your PS3 to run algorithms.

Anybody waiting for the Sony Home thing??

In my "quest" to take advantage of this technology interchange through streaming, I tried everything I already owned first:

Denon 3808 - Simple for internet radio, didn't try either streaming from the PC or plugging in a USB drive. That is all the Denon does, so I moved on.

Directv HR-20 - Used Tversity as the serve/software. Worked OK for music and photos, but VERY rudimentary.

Wii - Signed up and used the Orb service. A bit better than the HR-20, but pretty basic.

That's when I settled in on the PS3. This link gives some detail on a pending firmware upgrade (next few days) that upgrades the PS3 BluRay to 2.0. I haven't seen anything definitive on the PlayStation Home thing yet.

BTW - with a PlayStation Eye (Sony's $40 webcam), you can do pretty much real-time video over the Playstation network. Tried it last Sunday with my daughter in DC and it was great.

Well let's not forget the PS3 is pretty much a near cutting edge HTPC in it's own right so it should be heads above most other products out there. I am trying to convince my wife to let me get one to go along with the HDTV in the basement when I finally settle on the one to buy.

I have an HTPC with Vista and it works great and I am considering buying a blu-ray drive for it but im worried that it may have choppy video on it.

The major drawback to having an HTPC is that it is next to impossible to record HD content from any digital Sat/cable box.