Thought I'd update this a bit...
nephew bought a Sammy 2550 from bestbuy. Not ready for the streaming features yet, but broadband cable will be installed next week. But as you read on, you'll see it won't matter
Here's the quick rundown...
First sammy he bought didn't even power up out of the box
Second sammy would not load any fox discs at all.
Third sammy worked for a couple days and then he got scared and took it back cause of the previous 2 models.
He ended up getting a BDP-51fd from 6ave for $266 shipped (hell of a price if you ask me).
I burned him the latest firmware update (95 megs) and for the last week now, they've watched at least 2 blu-ray a day between himself and the kids etc. What really impressed me though was the up converting on this player. Very impressive. I would even venture to say it surpasses the sammy reon from what I did get to see of that player with an SD disc. But it could just be my jaded view of samsung.
Anyways, I gotta say, other than this player being a tank, it looks pretty good. Performance wise, it's similar to my BD55, just maybe a tad slower loading discs. I didn't really time it as I didn't notice it being slow.
I was at first concerned about firmware, but reading over at AVS, I don't think there is much to worry about unless pioneer just flat goes belly up, but info coming out from them seems like they are fine, just giving up the cantankerous display business. I've been helping with some questions he has on the thread over at AVS on this player, helping him do research (you ever try to load AVS on dialup? heck I tether my cell phone to his PC just so the page would load reasonably fast for him. I forgot how bad dialup was)
I am seriously considering buying one of these players to replace my PS3 that I sold. For the asking price at 6ave and the coupon codes out there, it's very tempting considering I don't need bd-live (had it on ps3, have it on BD55, found absolutely no use for it yet) and I don't need DTS-MA decoding on the setup I would be using it on, although that is coming late april according to avs.
Anyways, just thought I'd share.