- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 33 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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9 out of 9 people found this review helpful
3.5 stars
"Preliminary review of the YP-P2"
Pros: The screen is big and absolutely gorgeous and the touch screen user interface is wonderfully intuitive
Cons: A bit too pricey; Only has 4 Gb of internal memory; No SD card expansion; video conversion is pretty bad.
Summary: I just purchased the YP-P2 today and have played around with it for a few hours. Here is what I've observed so far:
The screen is huge, bright and the 480x272 widescreen resolution is amazing. Pictures look really great and seem to just pop out of the screen. Unfortunately, video performance is not as great. The Samsung Media Studio software is needed to convert your video files to Samsung's proprietary format, SVI. I converted a 30 min., 230 Mb avi file to the SVI format. Even at the highest setting of 1024kbps and 30fps, the video conversion was poor. The playback looked great for low motion scenes, but for fast paced ones, significant motion blur disturbs the video. This is quite disappointing as the screen is not fully being taken advantaged of. I will continue to play around with different settings and source files to see if any improvement can be made.
The touch screen UI takes a little getting used to, but once mastered it becomes amazingly easy to use and very intuitive. There are three different menu settings to choose from: skin, cosmos and matrix. Skin allows you to set a picture as the background and icons are selected at the bottom of the screen. Cosmos allows you to choose the icons as they appear to fly away or toward you in space. And Matrix shows the icons as a control panel. Samsung did a really great job designing the UI. The navigation, searching of files and playback screens are all nice, colourful and very well done. I especially like the fact that artist and album lists include small icons of the album art, which makes choosing a selection a little quicker. Everything about the UI makes using this player a great experience.
The sound quality is also very good. I would not say it's the best, but it's very good. There are plenty of EQ presets to choose from and you can define your own user EQ. A great feature is that you can change the EQ presets while listening to a track. The only problem I have with the player is that the maximum sound output could be a little higher.
This player could also use more internal memory or at least some expandability. It's a bit too pricey for the memory offered, however, you're paying a little extra for the screen, the touch UI and Bluetooth (if that's important to you).
Overall, I'm slightly disappointed with this player because of the poor conversion and performance of Samsung's video format, SVI. But it's lovely screen, sound quality and ease of use thanks to the touch UI and intuitive design almost makes up for it.Updated
In my preliminary review I said that the video playback on this device is poor because of the proprietary format, SVI, that this player uses. Well, half of that statement is true.
I tried different source files and output settings but the results were all the same; Significant motion blur for fast motion scenes and red bleeds badly between frames. So, I started to convert source files to WMV9 files instead, which can be directly transferred to the player without conversion to SVI. I was quite optimistic about it, but the same complaints remained.
In the end, I would have to conclude that the video problems are inherent in the actual display and player and not in the SVI format.
However, I also did play around with the audio and EQ settings more extensively. After making user EQ adjustments and hearing the changes in real-time (which is a great benefit), I was able to get a very nice, clean and loud sound. Keep in mind that I'm still using the headphones that were included. I'm sure it would sound even better if I had a good aftermarket set of headphones.
In conclusion, I will still give this player a 7/10. The video playback and the 4 gigabytes of memory are the YP-P2's biggest cons. However, the display screen, sound quality, touch UI design and the overall user experience are great pros that will keep me happy with this player for quite a while.
- 1 reply to this review
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Well I would say that for the video that you were talking about, you don't really need to use the Samsung Media XVID converter to do the job. All you can do is to find other video converters which can provide you a better video conversion quality rate. And if that's the case of having poor video playback, then it might be the source of your video which has a lower bit or frame rate quality, though is in .avi format. As some .avi formats give you a lower video quality and when you further compress it, it'll become worst.
And for the video resolution, please refer to the instruction manual which is include in the CD, it is stated which dimensions the video is best represented in, so as the frame rate and the audio output for video. Since P2 supports WMV9 format, why still in the use of SVI which is redundant! And WMV9 is the latest and the best quality video for Windows Media quality.
For the sound system wise, I would say Samsung has the better sound in MP3 market. By having their own DNSe(Digital Natural Sound effect), it's totally different from iPod or Creative. Here's a way to hear a 'surround sound' change if you are listening to any song. First set the 3D and bass to 0, then max 3D first and still with bass at 0. Followed by around 10 seconds later, set the 3D effect to 0 and max the bass, then you will definitely hear a surround sound change. But still is up to you to play around with the sound, rather than buying a mp3 with just basic EQ like Jazz, Classical etc.
Lastly for the price, I won't say it's cheap, but for a 4GB P2, comparing with a 8GB iPod Nano, P2 costs you around $359 and iPod Nano 8GB costs you $348. If I'm the consumer I will definitly pick iPod as the memory size is much more relevant and a better buy. But if I'm talking about functions and sound quality between Samsung and iPod, I will definitely pick Samsung instead of iPod even though it's 4GB lesser. Why buy a MP3 which looks nice in the design but not user friendly? No matter how nice it looks in the design, it does not matter, as long as the mp3 sounds good, it's important. As a consumer, you pay the price for the functions and sound, but not to look at it everyday. If you wanna look at the stylish design of iPod, buy yourself a dummy set and stare at it for all you want.
The above parts maybe just for reference for others and I'm not against you or something, just to tell you how to really convert videos, cuz I'm Samsung MP3 promoter. Happy using your P2.
Where to buy
Samsung YP-P2 (4GB, black):
$129.95
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$129.95 | Yes |
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