Sony PlayStation 3 80GB

You'll want to buy the remote: Using two hands to control basic functions such as play, fast-forward, and rewind is both ungainly and imprecise. I missed not having dedicated buttons for such common features.

To navigate up, down, left, or right within the disc menus, you can use either the PS3 controller's directional pad or the left analog stick controller. You press X to select options and to activate play. The O button lets you exit the Blu-ray player, the square button brings up the disc's pop-up menu, and the triangle button gives you a handy, transparent-overlay on-screen menu that pops up on the left side of the screen. This menu provides quick access to certain settings, and awkward access to dedicated, software-based playback controls (buttons for fast-forward, rewind, play, and stop, for example)--which you need, since the game controller lacks such dedicated controls.

Trying to perform certain operations, such as precise fast-forwarding, was particularly frustrating. The fast-forward steps ahead at 1.5X, 10X, 30X, and 120X, and you must press the X button to cease moving forward. Stepping forward frame by frame is even more awkward: No option clearly exists for this, but you can press the controller's X button to pause playback and then use the analog stick or the right and left arrows on the directional pad to advance a frame at a time.

Unfortunately, you'll have to experiment to figure all this out: The manual included with PC World's PlayStation 3 test unit provided no clues on how to use the controller's buttons for movie navigation. I had to dope out the responses via trial and error, and frequently found several paths to the same operation. This could be either confusing or convenient, depending on your perspective and on how comfortable you are using the controller to navigate the interface.

I found the pop-up info display elegantly designed--unobtrusive, yet easily readable. (The easiest path to this display is to press the Select button in the middle of the controller.) It's a good thing that the display is a pleasure to read, because you'll be invoking it a lot: The pop-up is the only way to figure out where you are in the disc, since the PlayStation 3 console lacks an LCD screen such as those commonly found on DVD and dedicated Blu-ray Disc players.

In our jury evaluation of image quality that we conducted for our latest roundup of Blu-ray players, the PS3 was somewhat less impressive than it was when we judged it last year. The Panasonic DMP-BD55K and the Samsung BD-P2500--and even Sony's BDP-S350--bested it this time, rendering sharper images with superior color and contrast. In particular, images from the PS3 seem especially bright compared with those of the best dedicated players out today.

Nevertheless, the PS3 remains quite a deal if you want to play high-def Blu-ray movies and aren't wedded to getting a stand-alone home-theater-style device. Even factoring in the cost of the remote, you're getting a versatile, reasonably priced Blu-ray Disc player that can handle all of the latest Bonus View and BD-Live content. Plus, you can use the machine to play games, browse pictures, and surf the Web, too.