Samsung BD-D5700

With its great feature set and roundly excellent loading times, the Samsung BD-D5700 stands as one of the best Blu-ray players on the market today for $200 or less.

A plain, glossy black rectangle, the BD-D5700 measures 1.5 by 16.9 by 8.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.8 pounds, it's a wide but very short player that can fit almost anywhere.

On the back panel there's only HDMI-out, an Ethernet port, an optical out, and a composite video output. A less-visible USB port at the rear of the player would have been nice.

The remote is standard Samsung Blu-ray player fare: long, rectangular, and blocky. The buttons are large and square, with glow-in-the-dark playback controls, but the rest of the remote is not illuminated.

It doesn't quite break any speed records, but the BD-D5700 comes close to beating the Toshiba BDX5200 ($179.99, 4 stars) in BD-Live disc loading time and loads non-BD-Live as fast as the fastest player we've tested, the LG BD670 ($249.99, 3.5 stars).