It's widely regarded the Samsung produces just as good a picture as other Blu-Ray players with the latest firmware. It's only let down with some audio features, which won't affect 90%+ of customers.
Personally, the slow load up time on the Toshiba HD-DVD players is far more of an issue than the lack of True HD on the Samsung
You can also buy the player for a little over £300 on ebay.com.
http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/ar...60&article_id=1927&page_number=3&print_page=y
'PERFORMACE The picture quality of Blu-ray Discs viewed on the upgraded BD-P1000 was right up there with the Sony and Panasonic players. Mission: Impossible III, for example, looked wonderfully solid and clean, and every last drop of detail appeared to come through. The picture on this disc and others such as The Great Raid also displayed punchy contrast and a vivid sense of depth qualities that seemed to be absent on the initial player, which put out a somewhat flat-looking picture. Video upconversion was also very good, with regular DVDs coming through cleanly and with reasonable sharpness.
The player's audio performance was also equivalent to that of the other players when listening to uncompressed 5.1-channel PCM tracks on Blu-ray movies. But it lacks support for either Super Audio CD or DVD-Audio disc playback. And Samsung's current firmware upgrade doesn't equip the player with built-in Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio decoding features we can look forward to seeing eventually on the Panasonic DMP-BD10.
BOTTOM LINE The firmware upgrade for the Samsung BD-P1000 puts it on much firmer footing. Anyone buying it now can expect to experience full picture resolution from Blu-ray movies, along with all the visual punch that the best discs in the format now provide'