i know that recently they lowered the price of this to $299. i hadn't read anything about this being temporary so i thought i had some time to get the player. now it seems that everyone has upped the price back to anywhere from $399-499. any word on if this will go back down in price or if other BD players will drop?

Honestly, do yourself a favor and just go for the PS3 or wait for another player to hit $299.

Here's a thread with some discussion about the not so good points of the BDP-S300.

i think you might have forgotten the thread?

Based on what I've read and owned, there are only 2 standalone units worth owning right now: Panasonic BD10 and BD30. I would wait until CES this weekend and see what players get announced. There should be some cheaper options this year, hopefully.

I've had my sony bdp-s300 now for about 2 1/2 months... have had no problems with it whatsoever! yes, it boots up slower than I'm used to with my standard dvd player... and the discs load slowly sometimes... but the remote is nice, it's easy to do firmware updates, & the quality seems to be there!

I'm sure it does what it's supposed to do fairly well. But to me, the inability to bitstream or decode TrueHD is enough to pass on the machine. YMMV.

I imagine at this point the BDP-300 has been discontinued and what you see on shelves may be it. Sony has already launched the BDP-500 and I'm sure a Profile 1.1 player will be announced at CES.

ok, thanks for all of the help. considering it's only been about 2 weeks since the price drop was announced, i figured that it would last longer.

Don't forget the 2000ES model that only costs $1299.