I bought this machine in order to have something to play my downloaded DivX movies on. The picture quality is very good at the price, and has some very usable presets to make compressed recordings appear sharper and more vibrant.
Only one problem. Whilst standard DVDs are fine, it butchers the picture when watching DivX recordings. This is most obvious on recordings of TV shows that have a logo in one of the corners, so that when viewed with this machine the logo is half cut off at the edge (whether left or right) of the picture. The same even applies to smallscreen (4:3 ratio) pictures, which again are cut at either side, and appear more square shaped than 4:3. I have compared this against the same movie played on a PC, and the problem is definitely with the Sony player, not the recordings.
So, for this reason alone, I cannot recommend this player.