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Product summary
The good: The RCA Lyra X3000 was designed to make it easy to record video in your entertainment center and watch it on the go; has useful photo features; supports music from ? la carte and subscription WMA services; and comes with a healthy set of extras. We appreciate the built-in kickstand, the memory-card slot, and the removable battery, and we eagerly await the device's future compatibility with DirecTV DVRs.
The bad: The RCA Lyra X3000 has only a 20GB hard drive (wait for the 30GB X3030), it could be a bit more intuitive to use, and it doesn't play lossless formats or radio. The unit also has poor audio-only battery life and a slow transfer speed, and it cannot multitask.
The bottom line: If you're looking for a good way to record and watch video using a compact device, the RCA Lyra X3000 is a solid choice; however, serious music addicts may want to use something else as their primary portable audio device, due to the device's 20GB capacity, its poor audio battery life, and a few navigation foibles.
Specifications: Device type: Digital AV recorder; Display type: TFT 3.6 in - Color; PC interfaces: Hi-Speed USB; See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 04/10/2006
- Updated on:10/20/2006
Portable video is looking more like something the average person might actually want to experience, thanks to smoother-operating PVPs such as the 20GB RCA X3000 ($399 list price). The multitalented device makes it simple to record from DVD, cable, satellite, or broadcast television; plays nicely with your photo library; and supports music purchased or rented from WMA services. Plus, it's the first device we've seen with a scrollwheel that approaches the iPod's on the usability scale, though the menus it navigates aren't quite as user-friendly as Apple's. While we like this budget portable video recorder, we'd like to see more than 20GB of storage. As it turns out, RCA will be replacing the X3000 with the 30GB X3030 beginning in mid-April. If interested, you should wait to buy--the X3030 is similar in look and feel and will be the same price. The 8.3-ounce RCA Lyra X3000 would fit into a blazer side pocket, at 5.0 by 3.1 by 0.8 inches. Its 3.6-inch, 262,000-color LCD is large enough for portable viewing but not as big as the 4-inch wide-screen found on the Archos AV500. Before we get to anything else, we must point out that the RCA X3000 is only the second non-iPod portable media player we've seen with a touch-sensitive scrollwheel (the first was the Viliv P1). It's about the same size as the one found on the iPod Nano, although the X3000's has raised edges. Like the iPod's scrollwheel, the X3000's can scroll via touch or rock in four directions in order to move left, right, up, or down. For some reason, the touch-sensitive aspect doesn't work on the main menu screen, but it works well for most everything else, including volume. Side note: Whatever music you're listening to also stops when you navigate up to the main screen, so the only way to view photos and listen to music simultaneously is to activate the slide-show mode.
The RCA Lyra X3000's attractive onscreen interface is well laid out, but it can be tricky to use at first. The constant option to open, play tagged files, tag all files, or delete each folder you open is tiresome until you learn to double-click to open a folder or play a song without reading those options each time. Another quibble: You'd think clicking the scrollwheel to the left would take you back a screen while you're navigating, but counterintuitively, it actually starts a song over; instead, you have to use the dedicated Back button on the top of the device to jump back a screen.
RCA includes a healthy set of accessories, including a car charger and an IR blaster that enables the device to communicate with your cable box, satellite receiver, or VCR for timed recording from specific channels; all major brands of television, satellite, and cable box are supported, with the required codes included in the electronic manual. You can record by time and channel, up to 10 programs without intervening.
You also get a full-size remote control for controlling the RCA Lyra X3000 when it's docked and hooked up to your entertainment system. The device uses the same port for A/V input and output, but the cradle includes dedicated connections for both, as well as to the bundled power supply. Once you set up the cradle, you can drop the X3000 into your entertainment system for instant playback and recording of audio and video, without swapping any wires around. Users will find that despite the benefits of video-download stores such as iTunes, Google Video, and others, being able to record directly to the device is the easiest way to get exactly the content you want--and for free.
The battery, which is on the back of the RCA Lyra X3000, is removable and replaceable, and it should extend the device's longevity over the years. A button near the battery lets you switch between Hold, Normal, and TV Out; the last option allows you to use the remote to control the device's menus and view content on your TV screen. On the bottom of the device, you'll find the USB port, covered behind a rubber flap that can be a bit of a pain to open. RCA includes a sturdy slide-on cover that protects the screen from scratches and other damage--a welcome addition, since a scratched screen is a major liability on a portable video player.
On the right side of the RCA Lyra X3000 is a flush SD/MMC card reader for grabbing images from any camera that uses those cards. Any card you have inserted into the X3000 also shows up as a removable drive in Windows when the device is connected. A recessed kickstand on one side pops out to hold the X3000 at one of two portable viewing angles, but it tends to fall over if plugged in--RCA's correct assumption being that you're going to use the cradle to charge the device at home rather than charging on the go. When the device is lying flat on its back, four little rubber dots on the back keep it from sliding around.
In MTP mode, syncing using both Windows Media Player and Yahoo Music Engine was flawless and required no profiling. After you transfer new content on to the RCA Lyra X3000 using MSC or load photos from a digital camera, you'll need to run the onboard Profile application in order for the new files to be recognized by the device. In terms of protected music, the device handles download and subscription files in the WMA format from providers such as Yahoo Music Unlimited; you must be running Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10 in order to transfer subscription content.
The RCA Lyra X3000 lets you navigate your music collection in all of the normal ways (artist, album, genre, or year), as well as shuffle within a single artist or album.
As for video, the RCA Lyra X3000 plays 320x240 AVIs encoded in MPEG-4 with MP3 audio soundtracks, as well as MPEG-SP videos created by the DivX 4/5 or XviD codecs. With any portable video player, the software included for converting video--so that it can be played back on the device--is critical. RCA's installer disc gives you the option to install a three-week trial version of DivX Create. Having had issues with that version, we'd recommend downloading the installer directly instead. Converting video for a portable device is tricky going, but the DivX Converter application simplifies the process immensely; you just drag videos on to the always-on-top app to queue them up, then hit the Convert button. It takes a while to process lots of long videos, so you may wish to convert those overnight; supported incoming-video file formats are listed here. If you're not the type to futz around with video codecs and conversion, connect the RCA to any analog video output (TV, DVD, and VCR) in order to encode video right on to the device. Recording in real time is quite easy, thanks to a dedicated Record button and clear recording options. We also appreciated the Timer feature, which uses the IR-blaster attachment to tell your television, cable box, or satellite receiver to change the channel at a specific time--then it starts recording. You can record audio from any line-level analog source, encoding the incoming audio at either 64Kbps or 128Kbps MP3.
Since the RCA Lyra X3000's hard drive holds only 20GB of data, you might run out of space for videos; videos recorded by the device can be uploaded to your computer to make room for new content. RCA says a 30GB model will be released later this month at the same price point as this 20GB model (read: wait for the next one).
The RCA Lyra X3000 also comes bundled with the Audible Manager (for downloading Audible's spoken word recordings; two free book downloads are included), the Yahoo Music Engine, and a plug-in for Musicmatch. You can add multiple bookmarks to Audible files, although you first have to turn on Audible bookmarking in the Settings menu. RCA also includes an application called Lyra DJ, which can supposedly generate playlists on the X3000 when it's connected via USB in MSC mode, although it was never able to recognize our X3000 in order to create the lists.
In terms of sound control, RCA included an excellent five-band graphic equalizer with 21 presets; making adjustments to each band is easy using the touch-sensitive scrollwheel. Using another fairly unique feature, you can tag just about any file on the X3000 while away from your computer, then play or move/copy all tagged items to a specific folder. An onscreen virtual keyboard allows you to name slide shows/playlists and rename files. We like this little extra, because it means you can start organizing your files before dumping them on to your PC to avoid losing track of stuff. Another thoughtful addition is the ability to set multiple bookmarks in any video.
The RCA Lyra X3000's robust photo-display feature lets you view JPEGs, GIFs, BMPs, and TIFFs. After selecting any picture, you can rename it, add it to a slide show, delete/tag it, or even add a voice label using the built-in microphone (as in "Here's me at the Eiffel Tower, before I lost my jacket"). Onboard image editing includes settings for contrast, saturation, brightness, rotation, and up to 8X zoom. You can set any song or playlist to play during a slide show. Photos and slide shows can be viewed on your television using one of the two included A/V adapters.
Handy extra features on the RCA Lyra X3000 include an alarm clock that can wake you with the song of your choice, the ability to function as a hard drive, a sleep timer, an onboard microphone for recording voice, and an autoresume feature that starts playback right from where you left off, at the same volume level.
Later this year, DirecTV DVRs will offer a feature called DirecTV2Go, which will use the RCA Lyra X3000 as a portable extension so that you can view your recorded DirecTV content on the go. This feature will be added via a free firmware upgrade; we confirmed that the firmware can indeed be updated, but the DirecTV upgrade was not yet available at the time of this writing. If all works as planned, this will be a great way to take your cherished DVR content on the go--and it's another reason why you should wait for the 30GB version.
The RCA Lyra X3000 sounds excellent through our headphones and stereo, but the speaker to the lower right of the screen seems tinny, as one would expect a portable device's onboard speaker to sound. Recording quality is excellent for audio as well, although it cannot record to uncompressed WAV; as mentioned earlier, line-in MP3 recording maxes out at 128Kbps and mic recording at 64Kbps. We would have preferred a higher-quality record option for line-in audio.Using the default video-record mode (medium), a 30-minute TV episode took up around 250MB, which means you can fit nearly 40 hours of video on to the RCA Lyra X3000 in that setting. We found this video quality to be adequate for portable viewing, although if you plan on outputting to a television, you'll want to use the High Quality setting instead.
Adjusting volume with the scrollwheel lets you choose between 33 different volume settings, which works well for setting volume precisely. As for menu performance, the processor is fast enough to make the transitions between the graphics-heavy menu system relatively quickly, aside from a slight lag when accessing the main menu screen.
On a single charge, the RCA Lyra X3000's rechargeable battery lasts 4.5 hours for video and 7.7 hours for audio. The first figure is good and allows you to watch a couple of movies per charge. The latter audio figure is not impressive at all and should be noted by anyone interested in using the device primarily as an MP3 player. Transfer of music to the device occurred at a disappointing 1.6MB per second over USB 2.0.
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