they say it will boot in 15 seconds and a retail of $1,100 or so.

Interesting... I have not used Yamaha since the Philips DVD debacle a few years back.

Hmm, hopefully the rest of it is snappy to - I'm waiting for a standalone that operates as quickly as the PS3.

fired up this unit tonight

took a full 60 seconds to power up, open tray, load a movie and make it to the main menu

unit is very solid, no ethernet port

will simultaneously do HDMI and 1080i via component

thats as far as i got

Hmm. No ethernet? That's going to make firmware upgrades harder than they have to be. And 60 seconds... well, even assuming that 15 seconds is the actual boot time, 45 seconds is a bit slow to load a movie.

[Link: yamaha.com]

its up on the US yamaha webiste now.

Both Yamaha and Pioneer are still overpriced for what they provide. You can get all the bells and whistles on a PS3 for 1/2 the price and it works fine.

And you get so much more with a PS3, like:

really great fan noise
not that good dvd upscaling...
no bitstream (Dolby TrueHD/DTS-HD MA)

I'm a bit tired of people saying that the PS3 is the best blu-ray player. :-) I for one think game consoles make way too much noise to use it as a DVD or Blu-ray player.

add to that, lack of good ir or 232 control. if have a ps3 and felt i needed a decent stand alone player