My wife bought me the Philips BDP3000 Blu-ray player for me a few Christmas's ago from Sainsburys using a combination of her vast collection of Nectar points and cash. It was originally selling for around £120 and Sue had bought it at a point when it had dropped by about 1/3 of its original selling price as newer models were appearing in store. It is quite wide (about 20 inches) and comes in black.

Blu-ray machines are still relatively new on the market and offer at least 4 times the image quality detail of a standard DVD, and Sue bought it because she had heard positive reviews online and because it was a good make at what was at the time a reasonable price - I will however mention that we have bought a couple of Technika Blu-ray players for other family members for half the price offering at least the same quality.

It was only a matter of months after first using the Philips product that we began to have problems with it. Blu-ray discs have in fact developed over recent years and many include additional content in a new file format that the BDP3000 did not support. From memory this was either evident on my Blu-ray Star Trek or The Day After Tomorrow which I bought from Sainburys and returned for replacement the same day thinking the disc was faulty because it wouldn't play. When the second one didn't work either we decided to investigate only to find that in fact the Blu-ray player which was supposed to be new was in fact out of date and needed a firmware update that we had to do using a USB memory stick with downloaded content that we had found off the internet, and it was a real relief when the DVD ran without any further problems.

We do not use the player much and so it came as a shock when we bought the Disney DVD Bolt for our 8 year old to watch on our main TV only to find that rather than playing the film as you would expect it decided instead to skip and play the ending half way through and the middle - you've guessed it, at the end. Again, we thought that it was a DVD fault until we found that it worked perfectly on our other daughter's Playstation 2 that we borrowed to check it out.

Experience of this machine is that it really isn't worth the money and recently when family members have tried using it, had found other faults including a new one - a blank screen. I can only assume that we have just been unlucky with this particular unit.

The machine has USB and LAN ports as well as HDMI and surround sound connections. It also has a few buttons on the device itself although it is 99% controlled using a reasonably sized remote control. It does have additional features which I could mention, but as my experience is not good of its basic ones it would be inappropriate.

I would not recommend this player.