The nice thing is that at this point the difference between low end and high end is gee-wizz features, not picture quality.
Crutchfield has a few models on sale right now for $250. They all get good reviews for picture quality, what they lack are things like wifi, netflix integration, onboard memory to store digital media, and they tend to be a little slow in terms of processing speed (and all that means is it takes a few extra seconds to get to power up and get to the movie menu and it might be a little laggy when ffwd/rwwding). So if you're not a power media user who wants your blu-ray player to be a media hub, the low end options are perfectly fine. Just read some reviews to see if any particular model performs better or worse on the kinds of movies you tend to watch.