Originally Posted by Paul Adams
What scares me the most is the quoted "power-on to menu" and "power-on to film playback" times - they seem insanely long!
They can be. The PS3 used to be the quickest, by quite a way, but I think the pack are catching up now.
So for those that made the switch to blu-ray (and not just to get a PS3), what is your perception of the player you bought?
I bought the PS3 primarily for video. Blu-Ray was obviously the main attraction, but it also upscales SD DVD relatively well, though not as well as all the sensationalist posts on AV sites would have you believe. It upscales better than my HDTV or my Sony DVD recorder though.
I'm very impressed with the performance. Only thing I don't like is that it doesn't have multi-channel analogue outputs, so hooking it up to anything other than a HDMI amp means you'll need to send audio via optical, which can't transfer HD audio streams. Might be an issue if you're using an older amp.
The image quality with Blu-ray is very good, haven't really tried any standalone players that beat it by much of a margin. And many of the standalone players lose out in other ways, such as disc loading, difficulty to upgrade firmware, not being HDMI 1.3 compliant, not being the latest Blu-Ray 'profile', etc.
The PS3 is also a pretty mean media streamer, and of course, it has the odd decent game too
Do you have enough time to make a cup of coffee between inserting a disc and it being ready to actually play?
Not with PS3 anyway, with others... probably
I just went downstairs and loaded a disc, just for you
I switched the PS3 on by inserting the disc, and I had the movie playing in about 50 secs, including button presses, menus, skipping trailers, etc. In real-world use, there isn't much of a 'lag' with the PS3. But with cetain others, you would most definitely notice it.