I got a Toshiba BDX2000 new on eBay at a good price a while back, but I'm thinking of getting a newer, faster-loading model some time soon. It's a great little player, but very slow to load (well over a minute on most blu ray disks, but dvds are very quick). It converts dvds to HD very nicely, and has played every blu ray disk I've tried, even though it is one of Toshiba's first offerings.

I tried to search for blu ray players on the forum, but found only incidental mentions. Have you guys ever hashed out what players are faster loading / best features / least probems / best price? Where would I look?

Thanks for any advice you've got.

Try Sony S470

When I purchased mine a couple of years ago, Panasonic had a bit of an edge, I think lately it has been Samsung. Most brands should perform fairly well. Even thought I don't have one, the PS3 is still considered a top blu ray player by most (over 3 years later!) and is a plus if you or someone does gaming. If you have the funds, I would look at Oppo as the people that have them rave about them. I still have yet to try one. Good luck.

The fastest (best?) loading blu-ray players are Oppo and PS3. You can't really go wrong with either one.

I had a Panasonic DMP-BD35 and the loading time was indeed very long. Now i have the bew BD65 and it's day and night. So i guess all new BD player will go faster vs your Toshiba.

I have found turning off BR LIVE speeds up load times immensely.

I keep meaning to turn it off but so far haven't remembered. Yeah, I don't use BD-Live at all, at least not so far.

Some players have USB ports that will play AVI and MKV files. This is kind of like getting a BluRay player and a media player in one box. I was looking at the LG at BB that had this and was on sale for $129.99 CAD. I know Samsung has one out too for a little more.

Don't know if you will see or hear a difference between players at this price range.

I have one of the LG players (BD560C, if memory serves) and I've found that it's somewhat hyper-sensitive to even light scratches on DVDs (BRDs seem to be ok). It may be that I have a defective product but after speaking to LG, they have told me that my warranty is a one year, over-the-counter swap at the retailer. Pretty sweet (especially since BB tends to ignore your warranty problems if you don't buy one of their extended warranty plans).
I love the MKV playback - great way to test drive HD vid before deciding if it's worth the purchase (note: you need a NTFS formatted drive b/c MKVs are usually larger than 4GB, which is the cap for file size transfer on FAT32 and drives formatted for Macs are not compatible).

I've got a Panny BD60 and it loads by the time I'm done popping the pop corn. I just got a BD65 for my dad (for less than the 60) and it loads by the time he gets back to his seat (he doesn't move as fast as I do).

So the 65 is faster than the 60, but I've never put a stopwatch on either.

I can't recommend a PS3 highly enough. I use it for everything, and rarely game with it.

Oppo still going gangbusters complete with superb upscaling on regular DVD.

There's not a thing I can post about this that won't get me banned from the forums and/or punched in the eye.

The PS3 creates more picture noise than my Denon-1740. The DVDs played on my 1740 have less noise than the PS3. Even though bluray picture looks sharper and sound better than DVDs, its better to get a dedicated good quality blu-ray player than the PS3 if you truly want better blu-ray pictures.

It is good value if you play PS3 games and run around in that Sony Home World thingie ... if you really use the PS3 fully.

The PS3 does have various levels of noise reduction. I prefer to leave them off, as a smoothed picture loses fine details.

I hardly watch anything on DVD these days anyway.