Entered CNET Catalog: 10/12/2006
SKU: 0878376000388
Manufacturer: Mach Speed Technologies Inc
Manufacturer description
The main attraction of this high-tech device is versatility. Capture time and view your favorite images, movies, and songs with the incredible TV5. You'll never miss a photo or video opportunity now! The TV5 is a camera for shooting photos and films as well as an MP3 for listening to your favorite tunes. You can instantly view your recorded memories on the screen as well as watch pre-recorded movies and video. It's a movie recorder and player, a music recorder and player, photo recorder and viewer, with a built in surround sound speaker so no headphones are required. Record, save, and share every moment while enjoying todays hottest media formats!Product summary
The good: The Mach Speed Trio TV5 offers an incredible list of features at a price that's too good to be true.
The bad: Nearly every one of the TV5's features is handicapped in some profound way. Sound quality and battery life are poor and the internal memory is only 512MB.
The bottom line: The Mach Speed Trio TV5 is proof that sometimes a product can be less than the sum of its parts.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 05/11/2007
Photo gallery:
Mach Speed Trio TV5
The Mach Speed Trio TV5 is a remarkably quirky and cheap product. If you scoured the world to find the cheapest MP3 player, DVR, camcorder, and digital camera--then rolled them all into one--you'd get the Mach Speed Trio TV5. To Mach Speed's credit, the Trio TV5 shows that an all-in-one MP3/PVP/DVR/camera/camcorder can be purchased for under $110. The downside is that some functions of the TV5 are painfully stunted. As a company, Mach Speed Technologies has a long history of manufacturing replacement computer motherboards. Over the years, Mach Speed has dabbled in producing budget-rate portable MP3 players, but without much success--the TV5 is a testament to this.
Design
The Trio TV5 has a suspiciously lightweight all-plastic body that measures 3.75 inches long by 2.25 inches wide by 0.75 inch thick. With no dedicated volume control or any typical Play, Pause or Skip buttons, the TV5 has the design of an OEM digital camera that has been awkwardly hacked for MP3 and video playback. The controls become somewhat clearer after turning the TV5 on and using the graphical user interface displayed on its 2.5-inch TFT color display. Still, tracks advance seemingly out of order, and something as simple as volume control involves a finger-dance of unintuitive buttons that make a cheap plastic clicking sound and often get stuck if pressed too hard.
Features
On paper, it seems unbelievable that the Mach Speed Trio TV5 can pack so many features into such an inexpensive product. The truth is that nearly every exciting feature on the TV5 is a bait-and-switch. You get a 5-megapixel camera but you don't get a flash (and the automatic exposure settings don't help much). You get an MP3 player that supports unprotected MP3, WMA, and WAV, but you don't have any way to sort your music into subfolders or even alphabetically organize your music. Instead, all your music exists in the same folder and is listed on the TV5 chronologically (huh?). The camcorder and digital video recorder both offer video quality well above the $110 price tag, but the accompanying audio quality on these videos is poor at even the highest settings. The JPEG photo viewer works as advertised, I'll give it that, but it's not enough to make up for the other crippled features.
A limitation that lies behind all of the TV5's features is its paltry 512mb of built-in memory. A memory card slot on the bottom of the TV5 allows you to add up to 2GB of SD card memory (at your expense). At this below-budget price, you may be able to live with the fact that you need to supply your own memory. But to add insult to injury, every time you power down the TV5, it defaults back to its internal memory and forces you to navigate through the settings menu in order for content stored on your SD card to be recognized again.
We were impressed to see that a device this inexpensive offered an input for AV recording and an output for television playback. Although direct recording produced lackluster results for both audio and video, we found that videos converted on our computer (using Mach Speed's included software) produced decent results. If you used the TV5 strictly as a device for playing videos converted from your computer, we could almost justify someone purchasing this product. Still, for just a few more dollars, you could buy a Sansa e260, Samsung YP-T9, or Creative Zen V Plus, and have a fantastic product that you won't have to hide from your friends in shame.
Performance
Again, at $109 you must know you're not paying for quality. The audio coming through even our nicest headphones was noisy and brittle. Regardless of what quality setting you choose, audio recorded through the line input jack records consistently at a brittle, monophonic 64Kbps MP3 bit rate. While video and photos were bright and pleasant on the 2.5-inch TFT color screen, with the TV5's poor battery life and incomprehensible battery status indicator, who would risk watching a television show or movie on a device that may lose power without warning?
Final verdict
Whether a product is $20 or $2,000, if it doesn't do anything useful then it's a waste of money. With a list of features that sound promising on paper, it's really a shame that the TV5 is crippled by substandard audio quality, a frustrating user interface, and a ridiculous MP3 player that won't allow for even the most basic music organization.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6out of 6 user reviews
Product works fine,pretty much as advertised
Pros: I like the ease of converting the various video formats works nice for videos.
Cons: It would have been nice to have a flash for the camera
out of 6 user reviews
No thing except terrible
Pros: it can play songs
Cons: it can't play songs or videos well
I'm a Chinese.This kind of Players were already out of date even in China, and every one knows it's in poor quality.
$100 is cheap?No.We even have some at $60 here.but it can do nothing except making you crazy,whenever playing songs or videos,or even just looking at its "masaic" screen.
out of 6 user reviews
would be better
Pros: i dont know
Cons: i dont know
out of 6 user reviews
A Great All-in-1
Pros: Lots of features
Cons: There is no flash
Let´s start with the 5 MP digital camera / video recorder. It´s true, it does only have a 4x optical zoom, but the colors and shots do turn out well. The video recorder is more fluid than my Casio Exilim. It also has a larger LCD than any digital camera in this price range.
Probably the biggest downfall to the digital camera side of this device is that it doesn´t have a flash. However, some low-light pictures can be brightened in photoshop to make them look better.
Now to the MP3 part of this device. Most people listening to their MP3 player do not sit and look and choose every song that is going to play. Most people just let it play on shuffle while they are doing something. To this end, this player is great. It does the job!
Third, this player plays videos that you put onto it. The videos play clearly, and the colors are bright.
This camera also can be used as a webcam.
This player can also record TV shows from TV using a cable, which you can later play back on the device. I have not used this feature, but it does exist on this player.
I think for the average person with average expectations, this is a great little device. You can watch movies, pre-recorded TV programs, use it as your webcam, listen to music, record videos, record voice, and take pictures of whatever comes your way...and it so thin and light (smaller and lighter than many digital cameras), you will not even know it is in your pocket.
I first discovered this product at a computer show where it was selling for $80. It was a big seller for the vendor, and most people who saw it thought it was a very neat little device because it could do so much; not at all a device that one should be "ashamed" to own, as the CNET editor writes.
Other people who own this product have rated it highly at Tigerdirect and at other sites where it is for sale. Sure, it isn´t the best in any one category; its advantage is that it does so many things. I don´t think one can complain much about a device that does all this, is very small and light, and only $100.
out of 6 user reviews
Great for videos. Not an MP3 player. Bad Review by CNET.
Pros: Great video quality for the money. Direct AV record
Cons: MP3 function is not stellar but it works
out of 6 user reviews
well... this is pretty pathetic
Pros: everything in this camera device lookin thingy..
Cons: everything sucks
