Blu-ray player loading times compared!
By Ian Morris on 26 May 2009
One cold and wet day, a home cinema reviewer was growing old waiting for a Blu-ray player to play his copy of Zombie Strippers — for review purposes only, of course — when an idea came to him. Some sort of ranking for how fast Blu-ray players load discs.
This way, when we review a new player, we can pop its results in here, and everyone can look back in five years and laugh at how slow everything was in the old days. Of course, by then we won't be watching Blu-ray movies anyway, because we'll all be too busy flying our rocket packs and dating robots.
To benchmark the players, we use a copy of the movie Vantage Point. The testing procedure is as follows: First, we turn on the player and open the disc tray. We then pop our Vantage Point disc in the tray. From there, we time how long it takes for a player to ingest the disc and start playing it — for the PS3, we started the clock at the point the mechanism started to draw the disc in. We stopped the clock when the Sony Pictures logo appeared onscreen.
So here are the players, listed from slowest to fastest with their current retail prices and their review score.
#5 Pioneer BDP-LX71
Price: AU$1299BD Profile: 1.1
Time to load and play test disc: 1 minute 54 seconds
CNET Australia rating: 8.5
A great player, with some of the best knees. Of course, we would still happily include this player in our home cinema judging on its fine picture and sound quality. A shame then it's slower than a one-legged horse at close to twice its peers' loading time.
#4 Sony BDP-S5000ES
Price: AU$1699BD Profile: 2.0
Time to load and play test disc (fast mode): 1 minute 13 seconds
CNET Australia rating: 8.0
One of the classiest Blu-ray players we've seen so far, the S5000 features excellent sound and vision, and while networking features are a little lacking it does have full BD-Live support.
#3 Samsung BD-P1500
Price: AU$499BD Profile: 2.0 (via firmware update)
Time to load and play test disc: 1 minute 9 seconds
CNET Australia rating: 8.5
The BD-P1500 was a genuine surprise to us and came roaring in at number 2 in our chart. It's also one of the cheapest standalone players we've seen, and it supports profile 2.0. A definite one to consider we think.
#2 Sony PS3
Price: AU$699BD Profile: 2.0
Time to load and play test disc: 42 seconds
CNET Australia rating: 8.2
The PS3 is essentially a supercomputer, so we'd expect it to load Java content quite quickly. Until the BD-P3600 came along it set the target for standalone players to reach, and we didn't have to wait for the robots take over and for us to become their willing slaves.
#1 Samsung BD-P3600
Price: AU$599BD Profile: 2.0
Time to load and play test disc: 41 seconds
CNET Australia rating: 8.2
Samsung has really pulled its finger out and brought us not only an excellent Blu-ray player, but a speedy one as well. It's a pity it costs almost as much as the Playstation.
Topics: blu-ray, loading, times, speed, ps3
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Comments (7)
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Spooksta commented on 11/01/2010 04:01
Great idea but they take ages to open the tray you know! More players please and test from power on please :)
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Jack commented on 06/06/2009 05:52
the samsun P3600 doesnt even need the power button pressing u just hit the open tray button!
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none commented on 02/06/2009 12:59
why dont you start the timer when you press the power button? i know alot of players take ages just to open the disc tray...surely this needs to be taken into consideration!
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ChrisM1 commented on 26/05/2009 21:33
Yet another reason that the PS3 is better than the Xbox
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slobbythegreat commented on 24/01/2009 11:31
are you fricken serious??? you only test 3 blu ray players but have a list of the 5 best blu ray players out but only the PS3 makes the list? come on you guys get a grip...put all the damn blu ray players up...this is nonsense...
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Frosty commented on 23/01/2009 08:30
This document needs an update guys! You've got more than half a dozen reviews of blu-ray players so where are the rest of the loading times?
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