I was involved in shooting a Crutchfield video today. We were checking out the Samsung BD-P1600 and Samsung BD-P3600 Blu-ray players. (I was pretty impressed by both of them, I have to say, and am angling to take one home and give it a more extended try.) But we got into a discussion about start-up speeds and I thought folks might find the results interesting.

You see, first-, second- and even third-generation disc players often have a well-deserved reputation for slow start-ups. That is, when the tray slides out, receives your disc, and slides back in, it's not uncommon for early versions of a player to take a long time to spin the disc up and play it. This was true with CD players, true with DVD players, and is now true of Blu-ray players.

To be fair, when I say a long time, I'm not talking about very long at all. It's less time than it takes to start up most computers. But if you're used to popping a disc into your DVD player and enjoying those lovely FBI warnings within a few seconds, you'll certainly notice the lag when it takes two, three, four times as long with a Blu-ray player.

And that's why it's not unusual for new players to generate a certain amount of buzz around speedy start-up times.

The Samsungs have been generating this kind of buzz, so we took advantage of the fact that they were both open and set up to try out their start-up times. At first, it seemed to us that they were pretty comparable. We tried a Blu-ray Disc (Crash, 2004) in the BD-P1600 first, then switched it over to the BD-P3600, and got a respectably fast start-up out of each. Then it occurred to us to race them against each other. The BD-P3600 appeared to win that test with flying colors; it began to play while the '1600 still read "LOAD" and it was several seconds before the '1600 caught up.

But then we realized that the deck wasn't evenly stacked; they weren't loading the same disc. So we actually found two copies of the same disc, put them in, got the trays to close at about the same second, and ... they tied.

From this we concluded that the two machines have the same, or similar, drives, and they do seem to be reasonably fast. We also concluded that speed may be affected almost as much by the way the disc is designed, and the burdens it imposes on the player when it's being read, as by the player's drive itself. The bottom line? If your player seems unusually slow to load one day, take advantage of that time to stretch and relax. And remember to blame the disc.