Hi Paul,
I agree with Phil. One or two commercial websites do provide images of the register pages, which is what you are after. However, some only provide images for a particular time frame. So you need to be on your toes about what you pay for. Often you are browsing, rather than chasing a specific record. Doing that, on pay-per-view, will be extremely expensive. Many families use only a limited set of first names, making research very difficult.
There are other problems. How do you know if your family were, at some point, non-conformists? I have a family, same parents, who used both the Methodist Church and the C of E church for baptisms. The county record office will be able to tell you if a town had more than one place of worship. It is not uncommon to find text that shouldn't be there and so does not appear in search engines. For example some curates/vicars wrote exact dates of birth in to Baptism records. The social state of some parishioners may also be enlightening!
There are a host of other reasons in favour of the record office and only one against. That is an inability to travel there from the other side of the world. There are a few ways to partially solve that. Be very thorough with your approach to pre-research. Use GENUKI, societies, sites like this one to ascertain exactly what records you are looking for and what else may be available and what is not. The Church of Latter Day Saints will import, for a small fee, films they have taken of the registers. CDs and on-line images may be available.
But to research items that are in the Parish Chest, and other documents that are not commercially available you either need a very good friend, or a relative with an interest to go and look for you. Some societies, e.g. BMSGH provide a link scheme for members, but you do need to be very specific. Otherwise it's hiring a private researcher.
Which Parish records were you after, and what time frame?
Regards
Mike
