Performance
The Opal's sound quality was average for its price. The five selectable EQ enhancement presets ranged from unremarkable to unusable. Using our Ultrasone HFI-700 test headphones with the Opal's EQ set flat, we were unable to detect any noticeable audio degradation. Voice recording quality was predictably thin but useful. Line-input recording quality was remarkably good, using the 2-foot, male-to-male minijack cable included as an accessory. Unfortunately, because the line-input function uses the Opal's headphone jack connection, there's no way to monitor your recording while it's happening. Even worse, there's no on-screen visual feedback to indicate whether the Opal is actually receiving any input. If you're going to use feature, you'll just have to keep your fingers crossed.
As photo viewers go, the Opal makes it simple--just drag and drop. As long as the photos are in JPEG format, there's no need to convert or resize. The Opal does not use preview icons for photos, so you have to browse your collection by file name, or skip through each photo like a slide show.
Video is not the Opal's strong suit. Arguably, including video support for a 1.5-inch screen is inherently silly, but that hasn't stopped manufacturers before. The Opal doesn't offer native playback of common video files such as MPEG, AVI, or WMV. Instead, you'll need to boot up the bundled RCA SMV Video Converter application to shoehorn videos on to the Opal. We tested the video application on a Windows Media Center computer with mixed results. Most MPEG and WMV files converted with no problems and minimal transcoding time, but our collection of AVI files gave us error messages. RCA's software team went over the issue with us and was not able to replicate the problem on their end--so maybe our computer needs a tune-up. Regardless, the whole converting process is too much trouble for the reward of watching cropped and compressed videos on a 1.5-inch screen. For a product like the Opal, including an FM radio feature in lieu of video playback would have been much more practical.
The RCA Opal, however, is not a bad product. The inclusion of a color screen, decent earphones, video support, and subscription music compatibility is commendable for an MP3 player under $80. Still, it's not a product we would feel good recommending. Out of the box, our Opal froze on a number of occasions, requiring us to use the player's pinhole reset switch. A firmware upgrade has seemingly fixed this problem, but when you add in the proprietary USB cable, lack of an FM radio, and awkward interface, the Opal might be more trouble than it's worth. During battery testing, our labs concluded that the Opal is good for about 13.3 hours of music playback, almost 2 hours shy of its stated 15-hour rating. When we attempted to test battery drain during video playback, we uncovered the fact that the Opal is incapable of converting or playing the movie-length video files required for testing.
If you can live without photo and video support, a player such as SanDisk Sansa Express is a preferable, all-around budget player. If you want to do your photos and videos justice, for just a little more money the Creative Zen V Plus can't be beat for under $100.
What You'll Pay
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