In the past month I have been looking for a DVD player that can play DVD-R/CDR, have good picture quality, decent options and proced under $500. I have returned several Sony DVD players – they were absolutely unacceptable. All of them gave C:13 errors more or less often when trying to play DVD-R ( i have a lot of them). On a few models that played DVD-R (intermittently) the picture quality was quite poor with certain compression types used on DVD-R. With Onkyo DV-SP501 I had no problems playing any of my DVD-R and the picture quality is excellent. I liked the setup options that it has, not top notch but very good for the $200 paid. I use Monster coax connection to the Sony receiver and the CD sound quality is by far better than of any DVD players that I tried. Haven’t tried mp3’s or windows media as I am not interested. We’ll see how this thing works on the long run (only had it for 3 days) but so far I am very pleased with this DVD player.