Many users at avsforum have been using it as an optical media player since launch, and I haven't heard of any laser problems on there yet. It may be too early to tell, however.

It's a Sony console so that means it has a life expectancy of warranty period + 1 week!

 The sony stand alone blu-ray player takes forever to load 

I feel it will lies in the life of the blue LED used to read the Disk.

Maybe they can reach 50K hours life on the blue LED, but the brightness of this LED will be half at the 50K hours mark.

I am hoping that this doesnt reduce the ability to read disks, otherwise the life will be a lot shorter than we would hope, and i am hoping the sony engineers ensured the heat inside the box was low around the LED as this would affect the life of the Blue led substancially.

Thank you sir.

This has been my main argument against using any of my consoles as a DVD player. My brother is always trying to "borrow" my PS2 to play DVD's and he doesn't understand why I object.

All electronics are built with a life expectancy.

When you play DVD's or Blu-Ray discs on them, you are using every part of the console constantly, the laser, the fans, the motor, the processor, and your constantly streaming it.

Games, I assume, are far less stringant on a console than are movies.

So, basically, why use up the life of my console playing movies, which are guarnteed to last for hours, when I could just buy another player specifically for this purpose.

It's not the issue of money, its the issue of having to send a console off, buy a new one, lose all my HD stuff, game saves, ect, and it's not something I want to bring closer to me because I was gonna play movies instead of play videogames on my videogame machine.

If game machines lasted forever, and weren't on a clock of death or malfunction, I could see using them for whatever old thing you wanted to do, and not worry about it.

...but not me. I'm obsessive-compulsive, and can't stand the thought of my 500 dollar game machine, which I love, breaking down for some reason, because my family wanted to watch Hidalgo on Blu-Ray.

Sorry, watch it on your time, not mine. I'm sternly against the use of gaming machines as DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players, always have been, and always will be.

If your PS3 breaks down, its the end of the world. If your blu-ray player breaks down, honestly, who cares if its gone for a month or two. I can live without it, but not without games. 

@ Rocketpig and ZenfoldorVGI

Maybe I have just been lucky, but I have owned virtually every console from Pong, and I have never had a console go bad on me. They collect dust in a closet (or I give them away) before they break.

If I paid $600 for the PS3, and it's more likely that it will stop using it before it breaks, why not get as much use out of it as I can?