Epson P-2000 Photo Fine Player
By way of Gizmodo, there’s news of a new portable device by Epson that can display pictures, download them from Compact Flash or SD cards, and possibly play music and videos. The only information available right now is in Japanese, so I’m not even sure when or if this will make it to market outside of Japan, but it looks pretty exciting as a kind of convergence media device. Also, because this is in Japanese, I can’t really be sure of what the device is supposed to offer. What’s included below is just guesswork based on the few non-Japanese words and the pictures, so take what’s below with a grain of salt! And if anyone reading this knows Japanese and do a bit of translating, that would be great help!
The device, called the P-2000 Photo Fine Player, looks like it is designed primarily to view and download images. It looks like one possible feature may be to allow the user to zoom in to a smaller area within a picture and move around, as well as getting a kind of contact sheet of multiple images so that one can quickly move to the an image and display it. Apparently the device can display RAW image files from a series of Nikon and Canon cameras, but no Fuji or Olympus RAW, at least not listed. It looks like one can also hook the device directly to a TV or monitor for displaying pictures or other media, as well as hook the device to a printer (at least one that uses Epson’s USB Direct Print protocol) for printing things without involving a separate computer.
As far as this “other media” goes, all I can see is the mention of MPEG-4, a type of video format that allows for very good compression rates, and QuickTime, which MPEG-4 is based on. There’s also a mention of “motion jpeg” which displays full jpeg images as movies, thus is compressed only to the point that individual jpegs are compressed – it’s not a scheme in use nearly to the extent that QuickTime or MPEG-4 are.
The device also plays audio. MP3 is mentioned as well as AAC. AAC is a file format that like MP3 is lossy, but whose compression scheme is better, allowing for higher quality audio even with higher compression rates. The other big advantage to having AAC support is that this is the format Apple uses for it’s iTunes downloadable music files. However, I’m not sure whether simply supporting AAC also means that one can play such files on this device, since the AAC files that Apple provides have a copy-protection mechanism built in which may not be supported by the device.
While there are other “PMP” (Personal Media Player) devices out there that serve those who want to want to both listen to music, watch movies, and view pictures on the go, this is the first one that I’ve seen that also seems to add the functionality that is critical for serious digital photographers – the ability to directly download pictures from memory cards. The large capacity can hold over 6,000 of the largest files my 6-Megapixel D70 can produce, making it a pretty long-term portable storage device if one can’t take an actual laptop on location or load up on hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of storage cards. Also the ability to hold the files on a more portable device than the camera itself with what looks like a larger screen and the ability to manage the images to some extent would just make this all the better.
A couple of pertinent questions come to mind other than the most obvious ones of whether it will actually be sold outside of Japan and if so when. First, the rate at which various other card reader/storage solutions like this can download images seems to vary quite a bit. Belkin makes a couple of devices for the iPod that will do basically everything this will but without any viewing capability. The main problem with it and the reason I haven’t bought it is that the speed they transfer images is exceedingly slow, upwards of a half hour for a 512MB card with 80 pictures. This may be ok for a lot of people, but if you are doing some moderately heavy shooting where hundreds of pictures and several 512MB cards are necessary, this sped just won’t cut it. Aside from which apparently transferring even one 512MB card depletes the iPod’s battery so much that you really can’t use it for more than this without then charging it for a much longer period of time before the next card is downloaded. Other dedicated devices, such as the Flashtrax, are said to be a lot faster.
Then there’s the little question of price. If this thing is priced at a hefty $700 or more, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility given all its capabilities, this could put it out of reach for a most people. Of course professional photographers will probably not be as fazed, since it’s easy to pay twice this for a really good lense, let alone a DSLR camera body. But the average consumer could get just as much use out of this as a professional or serious amateur photographer, since a huge number of people now have digital cameras and it only takes a long vacation to demonstrate how quickly memory cards can be eaten up unless you take your laptop and do daily dumps of your images onto it.
I for one love to see such devices and hope more companies come out with them. One wonderful feature I can think of would be a keyboard so that one can either rename images easily, or change metadata for a given image. The ability to hook the device to a cell phone (via wires or wireless) to upload your images online would be great, although even for one 6MB file, this might take an excruciatingly long period of time with current mobile phone speeds. Eventually, I would hope one could go into a Blockbuster or other such place and download any movie one desires via a kiosk. But I guess such kiosks could be placed anywhere and could also offer any music as well as movie or tv show. Pairing such a device eventually with a smartphone and giving it the ability to communicate via Wimax and/or Wireless USB would enable buying and downloading media virtually anywhere. This is all pretty far away, but maybe not as far away as it seems. The technologies all exist in one for or another and except for the expense in creating such a device and the need for it to be relatively small, it could be created right now, more or less.