Just to give an another opinion, I think that the Mercury is a terrible receiver. It has bugs that Fortec has been told about, and they have not addressed them after a year and a half, so you'd have to assume that they will never be fixed.
The only good thing about the Mercury is that it has very good video.
But the bugs were so significant that I basically took mine apart and took the power supply out of it to use in another receiver (although I have since put it back together since it looks like my Fortec Ultra is giving signs of giving up the ghost).
If you get an Ultra, forget about using DiseqC-1.2, unless you set up your sats once and never delete a satellite. If you delete a sat, it scrambles all the positions. You can't select what DiseqC-1.2 satellite number corresponds to what satellite. It selects sat numbers in order, doesn't tell you what was selected, then scrambles them so they don't work.
Also, while some have said that AC3 works "as it should" I've found that the AC3 out of the Mercury only works with half the AC3 decoders I have, ie decoders that work fine with AC3 out of other receivers, but don't work with the Mercury.
Many besides me have observed that in some menu screens, particularly screens you use when looking for satellites and trying to tweak signal strength, the signal reading goes away. Many, besides me, have reported that signal strength jumps rapidly from zero to high values, jumping all over the place at times. I observed that while on vertical polarity, that while watching a strong channel, that the signal would randomly go away. After switching channels the signal came back. I eventually found that when on vertical polarity, that the Mercury would just randomly shut of the LNB voltage. It would only come back if I'd switch to a horizontal polarity channel, then back to the vertical channel. I found that in this state, that the receiver still worked OK if slaved to another receiver, so that the other receiver provided LNB power.
Also, people above said that the blind scan worked well. Well I don't agree with this either. I repeatedly found that the Mercury's blind scan would not find transponders that I knew were there from other receivers. Add that to the fact that when the Mercury does find transponders, it generally reports freq/SR values that are far enough off that if you try putting them into a receiver that has a tight tuner, that other receivers can't lock on the incorrect parameters that the Mercury reports. The loose tuner in the Mercury also often results in the receiver locking on the wrong transponder in cases where there are numerous low SR signals near to each other.
There are some other bugs that I can't remember off hand. And I am convinced that all of the bugs I mentioned above existed in my Mercury from the start, it's just that it took me the best part of a year to understand what the receiver was doing. Of the 9 DVB receivers I have owned, the Mercury is the worst. I stopped using it nearly a year ago after I finally got fed up with all the bugs.
Add to the problems with the firmware/hardware bugs, the receiver doesn't have a full function channel editor. Earlier Fortec receivers had a very nice channel editor, but the Mercury's doesn't allow setting important satellite parameters (I can't remember off hand which, I just remember that I had to use resort to using a binary editor at times to do things manually).
The receiver does have good video though, at least when using the component output. Much better than that from my Ultra, but no better than that from my Fortec Lifetime. My first DVB receiver was a Fortec Lifetime, and so far, it was the best. It didn't have blind scan, so I switched to an Ultra, which was a drop in quality, but the blind scan made up for it, as it was always right on. The Mercury, and another Fortec model were big disappointments. I know nothing about the "mini" receiver being compared, but I have cannot recommend the Mercury at all.
