Them blue rays

[blkmage]

So as I have purchased a bunch of anime on Blu-ray discs and do not live with someone who has a PS3 anymore, I am in the market for a BD player. I'm trying to stick as close to $100 as possible and some candidates I've been looking at are the LG BD555C and the Sony BDP-S370. I'm leaning towards the Sony at the moment, but I'd be interested to hear if there are any other suggestions.

I'm also planning on picking up a new monitor with HDMI in, as I don't have a TV and I don't really watch TV anyway and the second monitor will be more useful to me. For that, I'm hoping to go for one that's under $200 and I've got my eye on some of the various ASUS models. I'd like some suggestions for this too.

tl;dr - tell me what BD player and HDMI capable monitor to get

[blkmage]

Well, in case anyone was curious, I went for the BDP-S370. My Kara no Kyoukai BDs worked great and looked and sounded great. It also has the super-convenient feature of being able to play various video files off of a USB stick and has surprisingly good support for softsubbed MKVs. Madoka Magica looks pretty hot on an HDTV.

[ShiroiHikari]

That USB stick feature sounds pretty excellent. I use a PS3 for my Blu-rays, but it's kind of a pain to watch softsubbed animu on the PS3.

[blkmage]

It doesn't work perfectly, since it depends on whether the video in the MKV is encoded in a format that can be read by the player. I know some of the BD rips didn't work because the audio is encoded differently from TV broadcasts and one of the TV rips made the player freeze. I was surprised that it was able to read SSA subs (which most fansubbed files use), since most of these things only read SRT subs. So, I guess the files that it can play are from fansub groups with people who know how to encode video properly. Also, I think it can only read drives that are FAT32 formatted and not NTFS, but I don't have any computers that can write to NTFS to test, so if you have any files over 4 GB, you won't be able to use them.