Blu-ray player loading times compared!

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$1299
BD 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$1699
BD 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$499
BD 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$699
BD 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$599
BD 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.