I recently bought a Panasonic DMP-BD605 Blu-Ray player. When I tried to play a Blu-Ray movie, I found that it loads a lot slower than DVD! Some google searches reveal that slow loading is a common problem amongst Blu-Ray players. The quickest Blu-Ray player happens to be the PlayStation 3.
The following video demonstrates how long it takes to load a disc and navigate to the main menu, using a regular DVD and a Blu-Ray disc. I used a Panasonic DMP-BD605 with firmware version 1.5 and Quickstart enabled
Here are the summarized results :
| Load Times (min:sec) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Initial load | Go to Top Menu | |
| DVD | 0:31 | 0:06 |
| Blu-Ray | 1:10 | 1:03 |
As you can see, the Blu-Ray takes more than twice to initially load a disc versus a DVD. What’s worse, navigating to the Top menu takes over 10 times longer on a Blu-Ray disc versus a DVD. I cannot believe that people tolerate this kind of latency when they are used to the shorter times on a DVD. It gets to a point that it is way too slow for my taste and I am seriously considering to return this Blu-Ray player.
The picture quality of Blu-Ray is unmatched for sure, but I’ll be happy to wait a few more years until load times become more acceptable.
