Now BluRay is the king and seeing some impressive demos on my own TV in store I've decided to go for BluRay now.

Trouble is should i bother about the firmware in players? I have my eyes set on a Panasonic DMP-BD30 but just found out that a new version DMP-BD35 will be out next month- do i wait?- the only difference i can see is that the 35 is 2.0 profile.

Also is this the best BlueRay player? or can someone recommend me another (profile 2.0 if possible)

I'm stuck and confused!

If you want the latest you'll always be waiting - there will be new stuff coming out all the time.

I picked up a PS3 because I wanted to ensure that firmware wouldn't be an issue.

Have a search on this forum, there have been loads of posts like yours over the past few months.

Profiling is a unique way of presenting addition features, you can have PIP for example, or the player can get additional extras/info on the movie you are watching if connected to the net.

If profiling is important to you then you need to be looking at a player that can be upgraded, the only one I know off hand is the PS3 which I own.

If you just want to want to watch the main movie then profiling will not be important so you'd be free to choose any product you fancied.

Is profile 2 going to be the final profile? or will BluRay be getting more and more.... is that fair for the consumer?

Profile 2 should be it, any advances will come in disc capacity which according to spec every single Blu-ray drive should be able to handle. Beyond that then we are talking a brand new format or perhaps no replacement in traditional terms as the optical format for delivering content becomes obsolete as a consumer product.

Think i might wait a little longer for the profile 2 players. There's the Sony 350 and Panasonic BD35. See what happens to the price. Having a Panasonic TV and reading that the Panasonic is better than the sony players- might wait for the Panny next month.

as long as it is connected to a broadband connection

It's not vital to have the PS3 connected to a broadband connection for updates, though you will need access to BB to download the updates to a memory stick/flash drive to update the unit this way.

Unless you want your Bluray releases to be able to connect to the net to download additional features then forget Profile 2.

Profile 1.1 should do you.

The Profile 2 additions will be as much use in real life as the dvd multiangle feature

had dvd since 1998 and never used that once...

It was rarely used for its original purpose - but one thing it was used for by some companies - mainly Disney in the USA was to present alternate language opening and closing titles based on your language selection.

So when you select French audio you get the titles in French too.

Only ever saw them on R1 dvd's

Technically Profile 1.1 is actually "the final profile" - 2.0 is simply an optional profile for additional features that may or may not be important to you so you can save money by going for a 1.1 player if you don't want to pay for features you'll never use. I fully agree with above poster that Profile 2 features are analagous to multi-angle on DVD. It's the sort of thing people will rarely use and yet some will get all upset about if their player doesn't support them.

I think what you were actually asking though is are any further profiles likely to appear in the future - well I think it's very unlikely, though you can never be sure. Adding features to later generations of player is nothing particularly new though. To draw on analogies with DVD again, remember that many early DVD players didn't support playback of dts soundtracks and nowadays most do. It's the same sort of thing as profiles only in Blu-ray's case they have actually provided a framework to identify what features are and aren't included in a given player.

Right now though the PS3 is still one of the best choices of Blu-ray player. Don't be put off by the fact it is a games console, it is universally recognised as one of the best Blu-ray players for its price and you also get a home entertainment / console bundled in too. Remember it is profile 2.0 and updateable via firmware (it was originally profile 1.0 then 1.1 and most recently 2.0). It also supports decoding of all of the HD audio formats on Blu-ray (Dolby TrueHD, dts-Master Audio and PCM/uncompressed) when hooked up to a suitable surround system (that accepts PCM over HDMI).

If you are dead set against the PS3 for aesthetic reasons or simply would never ever use the games console or entertainment hub features and can get the Panasonic for much less then I wouldn't worry too much about profile 1.1 vs 2.0. Only a small handful of discs have BD-Live features (which is what 2.0 adds support for), and from what I have seen it is relatively daft things like ringtone downloads that could easily be done (and probably are anyway) on a movie's website as well. Do you usually watch all of the special features of a disc? If so then you might want to have a demo of what sort of things BD-Live does and consider whether they will be things you would be interested in or not and base your decision on that.