I've had this BDP S300 for a few weeks now & over all it's an ok machine. Yes it is slow to power on & load Blu Ray discs but I think this is a problem not unique to Sony machines. The picture is indeed sharper with richer colour but I'm not sure that it's the 5 times quality of DVD often used to describe Blu Ray or HD. I think where you notice the picture quality differance most is with lots of detail in big wide shots, on DVD compression started to kick in and cause break up or softness of the picture. The other plus is the HDMI out if you have an LCD which does away with any analogue colour bleeding. But I still not sure if it was worth paying out nearly £200 for these few niceties. My advise is if you've got a high end DVD connected via SCART stay with it until it starts playing up, then you might as well upgrade.