So if you were to buy a BD player today, three of your options would be the $1300 Panasonic, the $1000 Samsung (though it can be had for much cheaper), and the $500 PS3. Sound & Vision magazine took a look at these three BD players, though I wonder why they didn’t include the Philips player, which is also currently available.

Maybe I should be writing this article over at PS3Blog.net. Why? Because the reviewer’s favourite BD player was the cheapest of them all - the PS3. Why?

This machine’s picture and sound quality were nothing short of stunning, and its HDMI 1.3 connection and built-in Dolby TrueHD decoding give it a layer of future-proofing that the other players currently lack. I also appreciated its multichannel Super Audio CD playback and 60-GB hard disk for storing compressed music files. And even though I don’t have much use for the PS3’s gaming capabilities, I definitely got a kick out of Resistance: Fall of Man. The PS3’s $600 price — several hundred less than the others — also goes a long way toward making it the Blu-ray Disc player of choice.

Yup, that’s what I have - a PS3! I use it as a BD player when I have a BD movie to watch (which is still not that often). But I can contest that it makes a really good BD player.

Also of note in the review is this:

A more interesting outcome was the mild “jaggies” that I noted when watching M:I III on HD DVD — a video artifact caused by the Sony projector’s deinterlacing of the Toshiba HD DVD player’s 1080i-format output. Not all TVs will have this problem, but it confirmed for me the advantage of using a true 1080p source like Blu-ray (Toshiba’s second-generation HD DVD player will feature 1080p output over HDMI, which should bring it up to speed with the players tested here).

Shootout: 3 Blu-ray Disc Players