More Photo Viewers, including a new iPod?
Previously I mentioned a new Epson photo viewer slash personal media player (PMP) called the Photo Fine Player P-2000. The device has finally been officially announced, but I cannot find anything on Epson’s site or anywhere besides PhotographyBlog. It looks like most of the previous rumors were accurate. Additionally it has a pretty large 3.8 screen that can display images in VGA (640x480) resolution. Still no word on the AAC format and whether it could conceivably support Apple’s iTunes store for music purchases, or even Audible.com .aa format audio book files, but that does bring us to a relates story.
There have been rumors over the past few years about Apple coming out with a new iPod with a color screen that can display photos as well as do all the other iPod stuff. Well, it seems as if this rumor has popped up again and the sites commenting about it seem somewhat convinced that it is likely to be true. The new iPod is rumored to have a 60GB hard drive (which is supposed to hold upwards of 20,000 songs or 25,000 images), and a color screen that is the same size as current iPod screens. If this proves to be true, I’m glad that Apple is finally getting into the PMP market, since it will just add to overall competition that is good for consumers.
According to the rumor, the new iPod has something that most PMP’s don’t, the ability to take memory cards. The article lists “memory stick slots.” What I take this to mean is that it has more than one memory card slot. I think the author was using “memory stick” to mean the general memory card rather than what memory sticks are – the specific format that only Sony devices use. Otherwise, the usefulness of the slot would be relegated to Sony digital cameras, no doubt a sizeable chunk of the digicam market, but still a minority of that market as a whole. No word on the iPod being able to play video formats. If it did, my guess is that it would probably only support Quicktime video, another Apple format.
The rumors about the new iPod make it out to be more of a way to view pictures, but with the screen being pretty small, its more likely to be something that you hook up to a TV at a friend’s house rather than doing a lot of viewing on the device itself. The P-2000 on the other hand seems to be trying to merge the more consumer-oriented PMP market with one that might be more geared to serious photographers. Although prices for memory cards have been sliding at an ever-faster rate, the higher-capacity cards (2GB and up) are still pretty pricey, especially if you compare them to the capacities of these PMP’s of 20GB to now possibly 60GB. With file sizes increasing due to higher resolution capabilities and some people using RAW formats that take up more space than jpeg, cards can get filled up pretty quickly. This is especially true when you’re on travel, or filming a big event like a wedding. You can always take a laptop with you to dump your pictures onto the hard drive so that you can reuse the card for taking more pictures, but laptops aren’t nearly as portable as something the size of a PMP, and are usually a lot more expensive. But add the capacity of direct print, being able to view multiple RAW format files, and you can see that the P-2000 is geared a bit more toward the photographer rather than the general consumer. But the P-2000 also has MPEG-4, MP3, and AAC support, so it’s certainly attractive to the general consumer as well.
Of course, we don’t really know enough about the new iPod - even if it exists! – to say whether it how well or poorly it will compete, but I’m sure it will do well if for no other reason than it is an iPod. The large userbase of those who are familiar with the platform will motivate a lot of sales, in addition to it inevitably synching with iPhoto, a very popular image-cataloging program for Macs. Simply the Apple name will probably give it a lot of clout, as there are few big names in the PMP arena. Sure Epson is a big name in printers, but not in other consumer electronics. Archos is well known among those who follow the portable music or media markets, but that’s it. So many people may use the respected brand name of Apple to finally get into this product category.