Support NeoGAF

[Shogmaster]

Oh yeah! It's time to play with a new toy. I just got my Epson P-2000 from CompUSA.com yesterday. I played with it some. Here's a quick impressions.

First, it's not as big as I thought it would be. It's definitely bigger than any Pocket PC or Palm OS PDA though, and would dwarf an iPod (see picture comparo with my Clie NX70). I'm not sure if this thing is using PCMCIA hard drive or a laptop one. The write speed feels more like a laptop drive though. 2.5GB took around 2 minutes or less through the USB 2.0 port.

The screen is definitely the focus of this thing. It's not as big as the PSP one (only 3.8" diagonal compared to the 4.5" of PSP), but the resolution is much higher (640x480 vs 480x272). And the color, brightness, and contrast is better than anything I've seen on a portable device, save the 24bit TFT PSP and the 24bit OLED Clie VZ90. The LCD is rated 18bit color (like the DS), and it's definitely better than the 16bit VGA LCDs found on the Dell Axim X50V and my old Toshiba e800. Here's some examples, but the pictures just don't do it justice.

P-2000 is not a speed demon like my slightly over-clocked NX70 (300Mhz Intel XScale) at showing pictures, but once the pics are cached in the device, it's fast enough. Just don't expect a lightening response. 3MP pics from my Minolta Dimage Xg took about 3 seconds each to load via the SD slot. It might be faster if I copy it to the hard drive. I'll have to try that. The P-2000 scales the pictures pretty damn well to the VGA screen too. not too much aliasing is noticed unless you look for it.

Far as viewing pictures, I think this is the best experience short of a mini laptop. Sure, the OLED screen on the VZ90 might be more vibrant, and the PSP's screen has higher color depth and is physically bigger, but the resolution of this thing more than makes up for the difference, IMO.

P-2000 showed MJPEG .mov movies from my Dimage perfectly, but ones from my Clie (also .mov, but MPEG4) were glitchy. Audio and video went out of sync about 5 second into the videos in a really wierd way. I won't be able to encode 640x480 MPEG4 video until my copy of Adobe Premiere Elements arrives next week, so I can't test out the MPEG4 playback further till then.

MP3 playback is definitely bare. No random, no playlist, no nothing. Just sequential playback. Even though few of the 2.5GB of MP3s I transfered refused to play ("unsupported file") Audio quality was top notch. Don't buy this for music playback.

I did decide to store all my MP3s in the thing though, since I can play one of them along with the photo slideshow, and that I can use the P-2000 as an exteranl USB 2.0 HD and play the music via someone else's computer on the road.

Speaking of slideshows, that's the feature that I fell totally in love with the P-2000. It has couple of really cool transition FXs. Check out the video for one of them!

http://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=EpsonP2Kslide

So far, I love it. It's not the best "multi-media player", but it's the best damn portable photo viewer/exteranl HD with an LCD I've ever seen. :lol

 

[Kung Fu Jedi]

Looks like a cool gadget! What's the damage on that thing? I've got an Archos AV420 that I just love. Plays back video, excellent for MP3's, and a solid photo viewer as well. I love the docking station on the Archos that allows you to connect it directly to the TV to record TV shows, DVD's, videos, etc. It can hold a surprising amount of stuff on the 20 gig hard drive. I think at the moment I have 6 episodes of Michael Palin's Himalaya's, Star Wars Episodes IV, V, VI, a few episodes of Scrubs, and the latest episode of Alias. Plus I have over 200 pictures from my trip to Egypt last year, but no music (I've got an MP3 player for that), and I still have something in the neighborhood of 12 GB of space left.

 

[Shogmaster]

The damage was $606 with tax and 2 year accidental replacement plan. It's $500 MSRP for the device.

 

[aoi tsuki]

i didn't know this was released already. The size of the device looks about right given that in-the-field image dumping and viewing is the main draw for it. Pity about music playback, but a firmware update should fix that.

How does it look outdoors?

Edit: In the comparison, what program did you use on your NX70 to load the photos?

 

[Shogmaster]

i didn't know this was released already. The size of the device looks about right given that in-the-field image dumping and viewing is the main draw for it. Pity about music playback, but a firmware update should fix that.

How does it look outdoors?

I'm not sure. Didn't take it out yet. Next to the window, it looks like just about any trans-reflective PDA LCD.

Edit: In the comparison, what program did you use on your NX70 to load the photos?

Resco Photo Viewer. Absolutely the best picture viewer for Palm OS, bar none. And trust me, I've tried them all (Acid Image, Jpeg Show, Splash Image, etc...).

 

[Shogmaster]

I still don't have my copy of Premiere Elements, so I had to make do with Quick Time Pro, which limited me to transcoding to 320x240 MPEG4 videos. Those Clie recorded MP4 videos were not playing yesterday because I transcoded them @30fps. P-2000 no likey 30fps. It don't lieky anything above 24fps. When I recoded them @24 and 15fps, they played back fine.

The maximum bitrate for playback is 1.5Mbit/sec @24fps. It's not bad at all, but I won't know how it will look until I get something better than QTPro to encode the videos.

So far, I have a dozen QT .mov files I downloaded from the net transcoded to .mp4 files via QT Pro. They range from Red v Blue clips to couple of Blur video shorts. Even though they are only 320x240 files, those that started off as a high bit rate files (150kb/s or higher) look pretty good on the 640x480 screen of the P-2000. It's too bad that the device won't eccept XViD or DviX files, though. I have so many of those, and they look so much better at smaller file sizes.

But then again, I do have about 36GB left in the thing. :lol