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18 out of 18 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"I love this thing! If you ride a bus or train, get one!"
Pros: Frigging awesome screen, great sound quality (BYO headphones), fits in your business shirt pocket, simple interface, better looking than the other stuff out there, recording functionality
Cons: No kickstand, no dock, no stretch zoom, no included remote, no MPG playback, no AC3 sound playback
Summary: This thing rocks. I had a PMP-1000 I-station that broke on me twice, but had what I thought was a nice looking screen. It had a touch screen interface but the GUI was terrible.
I heard about the AV500 but thought "nah, I already have a PMP" but I was browsing the shops on a trip to Hong Kong and saw one in the window. I asked the shopowner if I could demo it, and after seeing the screen quality and simple user interface, I decided to purchase it immediately. I would deal with the 'cons' of the device and figure out how to pay for it later.
The device has excellent sound and good Mp4 compatibility. It seems to have ample processing power and the screen is very very bright. It draws eyes when I use riding the train here in Tokyo (they don't sell domestically). I have a 1hr each direction commute, which is perfect to catch a 1 hour TV drama episode each way to and from work. Of course a lot of people have no use for on the go video, but for those of you who are like me, get one and get one now.
Ever since I got this device, my iPod is collecting dust.
One drawback compared to my previous player is that it only plays MP4 type AVI files - it won't play MPEG1, MPEG2, or VOB files. Also it only plays AVI files with MP3 sound codec - videos with sound encoded as AC3 play without sound. I wrote a script that converts the sound and Mpg files so not a big deal except for the wasted time.
Also, the battery doesn't seem to last as long as the one with my old personal video player, but I can still watch about four hours of video on it even at the brightest screen setting.
I really wish it had a stand that would fold out the back for desk use. Also, the headphone cord plugs into the top of the unit instead of the side. I like this better than the right side plug of the AV400 series, which was annoying because my Sony earbuds wrap around my left shoulder, but the top socket means I'm always pushing the cord around to the back of the unit. Also, I was able to make do with the 0.5m length Sony earbud with the left-socket of my old PMP, but with this unit the cord is about 10cm too short, so I had to search for about a month before I found a headphone cord that was the best length (0.7-0.8m seems to be perfect - the typical 1.2m cords are too long).
The unit also includes zoom modes to try to fit non-wide video to the wide format screen, but the only available modes are normal aspect ratio - this means if you don't want black borders down the side of the screen when playing a 4:3 aspect ratio video, you need to choose a mode which crops the top and bottom of the screen. My old player had a convenient 'fit to screen' mode that stretched the source video to match the screen aspect. A choice would be nice.
Even with these shortcomings, I still give this unit a "9" mainly because it does what it was designed to do - present excellent quality audio and video with a simple intuitive user interface. That's what really matters, isn't it? I can live with those other shortcomings!
So go ahead - get out there and buy one now! Figure out how to pay for it later!
(Like a previous rater I wouldn't bother with the 100GB model. It would take you weeks or months to watch all the videos).
- 2 replies to this review
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all of my movies audio format are MPEG Layer-3 will it be ok in the archos?
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very informative review and thanks for listing the shortcomings. i'm not sure whether i'll dive into this one since i'm not a fan of having to convert files just so they can play on it.
what program do you use to convert the videos/audio?
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