What's the best Blu-Ray player for 300.-350.

I believe that the Sony S550 lacks the special functions that most DVD players have .
Like slow motion, frame by frame,advance etc.
Can anyone confirm this ?

Not to sound like a S550 basher but after doing a little research this morning about the S350, which is very similar in video performance to the S550 according to Undertow and several others. If this is accurate, according to a few reviews standard dvd upconversion on the S350 is only fair. The Oppo players wiil exceed the standard dvd upconversion process of the S350 Or S550. So if you plan to use this player for standard dvd, be careful! If to be utilized for Blu Ray only, I say give it a shot. Awaiting input Undertow...

On my screen after adjustments... The S550 exceeds the the oppo 980 h, and is virtually equal to the 983, Again most DVD's have errors or flaws which will ghost or be fuzzy, or just crappy washed out color… No oppo fixes this.. however GOOD dvds' are just as Good on the S550….

And of course Blu ray is simply flawless, and that’s not necessarily a function that just the Sony machine is better at because many blu ray players are really good, so are 700 dollar LCD's vs 7000 dollar lcd from 5 years ago! The format of blu ray fixes many issues no standard DVD will, however I have many newer and well done DVD's that are in fact basically as good as Blu ray in many ways, and during 1080p 6o fps DVD upconversion is done just as perfect on the S550 as it is on any oppo, again in some cases even better, and The Sony does in fact do Blu Ray 1080p 24 fps which is not beat anyway.. Again the guys holding onto some kinda "Special Function" or specific niche in a product that will cost more money GO FOR IT!! But if your looking for flawless Blu ray and DVD quality, with some nice functions and Perks for audio than the Sony is your machine for a price that will not be matched…

If you want much more for whatever you have a special need for no doubt anything can be bettered for your specific requirments.. However I am simply talking for CORE performance nothing will be better and especially at the near dirt cheap pricing we are talking here than the Sony.. And I am a custom hard core Audio video guy.. More audio, but videophile is a whole thing that almost anybody can see differences visually and much easier to explain than somebodys audio taste… You want perfect video go for it, if you need many other specific functions go do your own comparisons and find the best for your needs.

By the way a confusing but maybe slightly important factor here is OPPO sells with their machine the best HDMI made… It is a generic so to speak but basically the best available on the market, and I use this same cable to do all comparisons.. Now somebody going and purchasing a new panasonic, or sony whatever and using some 50 dollar Monster cable might get a different result, and they are not even as good of cables!! I forget who makes the cable its on oppos site I believe and it is highly accepted as being a perfect standard cable.. I can also tell you even an OPPO on a cheap Radio shack HDMI which I had looks worse!! They will tell you even they specifically use this cable and are one of the only companies that ships their units with a cable anymore to specifically make sure you get the video performance they want you to see. This may or may not be a factor to keep in mind, also I DO NOT use standard Power cables in my system, on the oppo or on the SONY, I have found a BIG difference in GHOSTING on the screen, color depth, and simply Video noise using far better heavy shielded power cables for best performance on these units, so yes for some you may not get or be able to expect perfection out of the box without some attention to tweaking your display on each machine, and delivering the results with the best cables and power feeding all this equipment. So again I will use the stupid audiogon tag line 'YMMV'

In the end once again you can chance ordering and risking anything you like, but the good thing is about the sony is it hits all points to be a good standard in performance, AND it can be bought right down the street from your house and returned in 30 days if you can't get it to work out for you!     

Ozzy
By the way I am being a little sarcastic here, but for me slow motion yada yada is the least of my worries watching a movie or playing a CD! Is there some major Blu ray porn releases out there for this or something :-) Seriously though I have no clue, and this is probaly the least priority I see most people caring about for most movie and music functions, at least I have never had a use for such things, hell I don't even care about multi angle features that started coming on DVD players 10 years ago! Anyway for 300 bucks this kinda stuff would not keep me from having the best machine for the job, my main issue with all the blu ray machines is their inability to save some previous disc stop spots, but not a big deal at this point.     

Mcroth66
As a final note on absolute standard DVD performance, either machine I have spent hours TWEAKING in with several factors in mind, I can make both perform as flawless as possible. And your display will make a big difference as well… As a matter of fact anybody with a 42" or lower screen will probably think both are perfect nearly out of the box… its when you get into some more sizeable flaw enhancing hard driven systems that certain things will need to be addressed. You could sit all day going crazy over making ever single disc look nearly perfect. I have in the end found the sony to be the best of all worlds, and of course there is a little bias as its just flat out capable of a function that the oppo is not, Blu ray… Now no doubt when oppo comes with a machine at double the price it will be a very good machine, but not for me or most knowing how to get this performance in the first place, accept if you really are banking on some audio formats that you really want the oppo for.

Besides all this, I appreciate many own 100's of standard DVD's and need the best possible way to play all this back over the years.. But guess what DVD's are basically worth 2 bucks now, and blu ray is slowly replacing them, but I own Vinyl too, and would not settle for anything less than excellent Analog playback on a turntable, but guess what don't expect a new CD player to be able to sound as good!! This is the same on blu ray vs. DVD… I actually don't care on DVD if it is just a TAD behind blu ray performance, It SHOULD BE! No ACTUALLY IT BETTER BE!! Or we just wasted all this time and money on nothing! So if your goodfather collection on DVD from 10 years ago looks as good or better on an oppo than the newly released version on blu ray with any blu ray machine don't buy a blu ray machine at all! See my point?