Pioneer Bdp-320 Firmware Update Download
Jenniffer Trotter
For standard DVD, the studio logo appeared on-screen at about 34 seconds, basic Blu-ray loaded up in about 42 seconds (to the menu) and the BD-Java Blu-ray title loaded up the Disney logo in one minute, six seconds. I had hoped that this might be improved via a firmware upgrade. Panasonic recently delivered a firmware upgrade for their current players which improved disc loading speeds by over 20%. However, upgrading to the 3.34a firmware on the BDP-320 (from the earlier 3.25 version) provided little or no improvement (a second or two either way). Compare this to the OPPO BDP-83 which loads DVDs in 11 seconds (55% faster), Blu-rays in 19 seconds (68% faster) and BD-Java Blu-rays in 35 seconds (47% faster) and you can see that there is much room for improvement in the Pioneer player's loading times.
Also, updating firmware produced a bit of a surprise, with the player telling me the firmware upgrade from version 3.25 to 3.34a would take 86 minutes (!). In actuality it took only about 10 minutes to download, unpack and successfully install the firmware update on the player and I did not notice any negative effects of this upgrade.
Blu-ray technology is still emerging and that's reflected in the constant firmware updates common to almost every player. Luckily, because the BDP-320 has an Internet connection, you can download firmware updates from Pioneer's website. The process is fairly painless and took less than ten minutes.
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