More Stats from the P-2000
I just got some additional info from Epson about the P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer (AKA PhotoFine). I’ve written before about the P-2000, which to me looks like one of the best Personal Media Players out there because it not only caters to the general consumer, but to the high-end amateur, or even professional photographer. Here are a few new things that I hadn’t seen before:
- Ultra fine high precision processing for close positioning and alignment of pixels, thereby increasing pixel count to 256 per square inch for better resolution and detail (I can only imagine this will look very nice, and viewing a dvd video capture at full resolution on such a small screen should be quite impressive!)
- View images from memory card without downloading to the hard drive (I can see this being useful for some digital photographers. For example, say you don’t have the time to transfer all your images, but just want a quick way to view them (and show others) on the road. Instead of compromising your camera’s battery by having them view the images on the camera, simply transfer the memory card over to the P-2000 and view them on a much larger screen)
- NTSC or PAL (this is a nice feature so that one can hook the P-2000 up to TV’s and not have to worry about the compatibility with different TV signal standards in different parts of the world)
- Speaker: Dynamic (symbol) 28 x 1 (Mono) (I’m not really sure what this means except that maybe the P-2000 has a mono speaker on it, presumably for listening to sound files or the audio that accompanies the video files. While Stereo would have been better, it probably wouldn’t have made a huge difference coming out of a small speaker. Let’s face it, most of the time, you would probably use headphones for this purpose, but it’s nice to know that you can actually share the audio without having to go out and buy accessories like a portable speaker system.)
- 5.8” x 3.3” x 1.2” in. (W x H x D) Weight: 415 g or 1 lb. with battery (So, here we can finally compare it to other players. Let’s use the iPod Photo as an example. The iPod Photo measures 4.1 x 2.4 x .75 and weighs 6.4 oz. So, we’re talking about something almost twice as thick, almost 50% wider, and almost 50% longer. This isn’t a big shocker to me, because around 2/3 of the real-estate on the front is the screen. The screen measures 3.8 inches on the diagonal. Compare that to half that – 2 inches – for the iPod Photo, which takes up only about ¼ of the front. You also get 640 x 480 pixels, almost ten times the number of pixels as the 220 x 176 on the Photo iPod. So yes, it’s not going to fit nearly as well in your pocket as an iPod, and at twice the weight it will weight you down a bit more, but if your priority is actually viewing images on the device and not just using it as a portable hard drive or something to plug into a larger display like a TV, there’s just no question about which is the superior device).
This product category seems to be getting more and more filled with new devices, and I’ll be trying to cover some of the others as they emerge as well. I would love to do a hands on review of the P-2000, but unfortunately I’m still not mass-market enough for companies to be sending me loaners units and I don't have lots of disposable income lying around to buy new gadgets left and right. I’ll have to see how much access I can get to some of these devices at a local retail establishment and take a few furtive pictures with my camera phone!