As a HD-DVD (HD-A1) Owner, I was looking to get into Blu-ray as inexpensively as possible. I found a scratch and dent player on Amazon, and after reading some reviews, went a bought it (sub $200 just like I did 2 years ago with the A1)... Definitely a good deal! I bought this player for the same reason that I bought the A1; up conversion. Yeah, Blu-ray looks stellar, but the proof is how well it up converts DVDs. In comparison of the 2 players, there are somethings that the 350 seems to deal with better and some things the A1 does better. The images tend to look a little softer on lower bit rate DVDs, but there is less pixalation (or glitter) than the sharper A1 - higher bit rate dvds however (Stargate Atlantis, and Superbit disks look stellar!). However, both are very watchable with a 10 foot diag picture.However, it does not take 2 minutes to boot like the A1 (first gen) does, and the only disks that seem to take a while to load are BD-Live or Java heavy disks. Still not as bad as the first gen HD-A1. [...]Network connection was flawless, and updates were straight forward...Good player for the money...

Just imagine this: It's winter and freezing outside, you want to warm your car up before driving away but wait, you cannot open the door UNTIL the car warms up, so you just stand there waiting...and waiting...What the heck is this? What were they thinking? BRRRRR!!!!
Back to this stupid machine...To turn it on, you either press the power or open button, then you wait and wait with a disc in hand, looking stupid, while the thing warms up. I cannot believe this! Why can't it open up so you can load the disc and go to the sofa and wait there instead of standing in front of the unit? Listen, I sounded like a Sony hater, but truth be told, their golden era is long past, the trinitron XBRs, the rugged Betacams, Hi8, PCM consoles no more. This Sony sucks big time and stupid.

but it does take a minute or so to even turn on. Once it's going though there is nothing like watching a blu-ray in full 1080.

I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but the preliminary reveiew it is a great player

I purchased this unit several months ago and it seemed ok until I started to play some of the latest Blue-Ray movies such as "Kung Fu Panda" and "Walleye" neither one would play in this unit! I contacted Sony and they point the finger at Disney. They ran me thru 20 minutes testing to see what "FIRM" ware I had on my machine and discovered I already had the
Latest" version which is (4.30)so which means there so called latest version "IS NOT"!This is a continuing problem with the "BDP-S300 and 301". Not a happy consumer! I would look at other brands and skip the SONY's for now!