These players invariably come equipped with all the accoutrements necessary to make themselves at home in a well-equipped, if not also state-of-the-art, home entertainment system. This usually means an HDMI output, along with component and S-video outputs for video, optical and coax digital audio outputs, plus 7.1 multi-channel analogue audio outputs on some units to boot. Most of these players ship with their own (usually infrared) remote control, which many buyers will want to supplant with a do-it-all universal remote, like the top-end Logitech Harmony 800 or 1000 series remotes, Philips RC9800 or newer Pronto models, and Universal Electronics Nevo series. Some include cables as part of the kit, but only a few include HDMI cables owing to their relatively high costs.

Table 1 lists all the standalone Blu-ray players we'll cover in this section of the story, and includes information about manufacturer and model, plus pricing and general remarks. Each player will then be depicted, introduced, and briefly discussed in its own subsection. One thing you'll note immediately about the Blu-ray field is that a great many more vendors are going after their slice of this market. This includes all of the major consumer electronics vendors from the original Blu-ray alliance - we count six altogether: LG, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, and Sony, if you omit LG from this list.

Table 1: Standalone Blu-ray Players

All of the three recorders in our list - namely, the Panasonic DMR-E700BD-S, the Sharp BD-HD100 and the Sony BDZ-S77 - are available only in Japan. With no apparent near term plans for US export, we don't provide further information about them here. That said, you can find bits and pieces of information about them in English if you search the Web using their manufacturer names and model designations.

Alone among this trio of recorders, the Sharp BD-HD100 features dual disk trays, with one for conventional DVDs and the other for Blu-ray discs, along with a 160 MB hard disk. For what it's worth, we also read from CES reports that Philips has a Blu-ray recorder in the works (the model IPS01 BD recorder), but the company was unable to tell us when this product might become available, or if it would be available for purchase in North America. Thus, it looks like it will be a while before videophiles will be able to use consumer gear to make their own Blu-ray recordings. PCs are another story, however, as you'll read in the next major section of this Buyers' Guide.

Interestingly, just as the Xbox 360 HD-DVD USB drive is the low price leader on the HD-DVD side by a wide margin, the Sony Playstation 3 is the low price leader on the Blu-ray side as well. Unlike the Xbox device, however, the Playstation 3 does include an Ethernet port and an HDMI connector, so it's much easier to hook up the player to a home theatre system. The Xbox device is USB based and will work as an external PC drive; given that PCs are even less happy about accepting HDMI inputs than they are about generating HDMI outputs, it seems unlikely that you'd be able to pipe output from the Playstation 3 into a media PC any time soon. (HDMI output takes a special graphics card as we write this story, but will be supported in numerous motherboards fairly soon.) For the near term, a straight shot into an HDMI equipped AV receiver or HDTV appears to be your best bet.