Start Render Time

[jarrod1937]

I've been doing a complete site redesign for an ecommerce site with the main goal being speed. Now, considering a lot of the load time for such a site is spent loading images and where 90% of it is offscreen rendering, i feel the start render time is the most important figure next to completion time.
However, i am at a loss as to why my start render time is so high. I just tested and i found the current live site has a start render time that is on average 300 ms faster than the new site design! But i am not sure why this is, considering the new site is structured a lot better than the old site, yet the start render is triggered later...
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100612...1/details/

There is a test of the new site running. As you can see, the contents of the html and the css is downloaded long before the start render is triggered. But why is that so? Shouldn't the browser only need the html source and css to start rendering? The only other items that follow are product images, which should have no basis on the start render time.
So anyone have any ideas?
Thanks