Sharp LCD TVs with integrated Blu-ray Player

My parents have 52" LCD Aquos with blu-ray player built in. The load times are crazy slow, but i guess it's not a big deal if you pop the movie in, and go do other things before beginning the movie. The annoying thing was that I had to update their firmware to get a movie to play. It was a fairly easy process.

Anyone else have one of these? I could probably check the LCD forums, but since the focus is on blu-ray rather than the tv, I figured i'd post here.

They remind me of those Sony LCDs that have the option for the rear mounted DVD player. Snazzy to be sure but the big question is how good the firmware support/upgrades are. Will you get three firmware updates and then nothing because it's been replaced by a newer model with a larger screen or are they using a common hardware/software platform that allows for a significant number of updates across the product line over time. Just a thought. Personally, I prefer the stand-alones for that particular reason but I do think it's neato to have the "junk in the trunk" nonetheless.

Yeah, I prefer separate player too. The goal was to allow it so that my parents could put a disc in, and the movie starts. They don't want to play with multiple inputs. They tried a harmony remote, and well..., my parents find a way to make it so that one of the involved devices fails to turn on/off which causes more confusion.

Then issues like having to update the firmware to watch a movie. It puts them off from wanting to deal with it... Even after the update, Slumdog Millionaire took a while just to display its first trailer after fully loading (according to on-screen loader). The screen was literally black for over a minute... then after like 5 trailers, it took another couple of minutes to display the menu. Other movies aren't quite as bad. DVDs load slower than a typical dvd player, but not nearly as bad as a java BD.

For people willing to replace their TV when their BD player fails, I suppose it's convenient.

How many hundreds of thousands of TVs with non-functional built-in VCRs littered the landscape over the years? And at least VHS was a mature technology at that point.

There are some products that, if I were CEO of a CE company, I would establish a policy of "let's not make one of these; instead, let's just hand out a flyer that explains why they're so stupid."

You can always hook up an external BD player