Time to pull the trigger on BluRay?


I am woefully ignorant about where we are with bluray. Is it time to buy? If so what are the SOTA players? I assume these players will play DVD and perhaps some other formats. I vaguely remember hearing that there are some features/quality issues still being worked out. Please educate the ignorant.
Thanks.
bflowers
There is a another thread "denon bluray" running right now that address the new universal blu ray. Might gather some more infor there. Just as an FYI.
Dont forget about fan noise, some of these units are pretty lud and can be annoying, as for "High Quality" HDMI wire I think thats a joke, HDMI is HDMI. It will be fun to see the new Oppo when it finally hits the market, I have HDDVD player and an upsample DVD aswell as Lexicon DVD unit but have not went Blu as my Projector is only 720P so when I upgrade that I will likely go Blu too.
Also as others mentioned if you go HDMI for video but cant go HDMI into reciever/Processor then make sure your unit has built in decoder to output multi channel RCA connections if you wish to get most up to date sound.
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Check out the Marantz BD-8002 Blu Ray player.

At $2k, it ain't cheap, but its performance makes it a bargain. The upscaled picture with the Realta chip is outstanding. The Blu Ray picture is incredible.

There are several other offerings for less money that are good. But, for a big screen like yours...the Marantz is the way to go.
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The issue with HDMI cables is how long it is. There is no shortage of posts from people having problems with their HDMI signal over longer runs.

Pretty consistently the problem is resolved with a better cable.

There are also booster boxes for very long runs.
Chadnliz said "HDMI is HDMI". Not exactly. There are important differences between different versions of HDMI (1.1, 1.2, 1.3a). In particular only 1.3a handles the latest discrete 7.1 channel audio formats, and Deep Color ( not really in use yet, but just wait...).