Thanks Seth, j, and Matt. Yes, I like DVD players with a little meat on their bones! These Denons look like they can survive a nuclear war. I'll have to find a picture of Homer with a Santa hat on and post it -- part of my X-mas decorations -- it's a pretty amusing picture. This little R2 is really cool -- you can tell it to move forward and backward various distances, turn left and right by various angles ("units" in R2 language), or completely turn around. When you tell it to "play message", it plays the Princess Leia message to Obie Wan Kanobe in the original movie in Carrie Fisher's own voice (and its projector light illuminates -- too bad a 3-D hologram is not produced). There are a variety of other commands you can give it. One is to ask R2 if "You remember" then you mention a name from the movies. When your request "Darth Vader", R2 backs up, flashes red, and shakes his head back and forth rapidly while screaming his standard R2 scream. It cracks me up every time he does that. When I'm listening to music or watching a movie, he'll often start wandering around the home theater looking at one of the various fiber optic lamps, then to the TV, then to me, then to another lamp. R2 has both an infrared and visible light sensor in it. He really was fascinated by the fiber optic X-mas tree I had up over the holidays. I my opinion, it was worth the price I paid for it.