If money is the biggest factor just go for it.
Some of them are better than others.
I have a 500 Euro DVD player and am extremely pleased with it.
The picture quality is really noticeably better.
I use the Philips DVP642/37. I specifically went over to the States to get one (actually bought four of them, friends wanted some). Target has them for $69.99.
It will play a straight .avi file, right from a CD-R, in DivX or XviD format. There’s a couple of encodes that don’t work, but 95% of them seem to. There’s also a region free hack.
By far the most highest recommendation I can make.
All I know is that I got a Sony DVD player years ago. It worked fine for a few years before I noticed a “glitch” (freezing and blocky picture artifacts) that would occur an hour or so into a movie (always in a similar spot). I ignored it for a while thinking it was just a bad disk. After awhile it seemed to be happening on EVERY disk to the point where it was unwatchable. I tried everything - cleaning it, taking it out of the AV case so it wouldn’t overhear, smacking it. Nothing worked.
Eventually I just chucked it in the garbage and now we watch movies on my girlfriends $50 DVD player from Walmart with no problems.
Actually there is one problem. Sometimes it takes a while to read the disk but once it is in there’s no problems.