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After bleating on for a while about getting this device, i finally stumped up the cash and got it delivered from Scan for the princely sum of £77 or thereabouts.
I've been using it for around 2 weeks now, and wanted to share my thoughts.
It's a small device, a bit bigger than my fist, and although it's made of plastic it looks smart and feels solidly made.
Mine is connected to a Panasonic 37" plasma (which actually only has a resolution of 1024 x 768 (and is therefore stretched to be widescreen) but actually still appears to be sharp and very pleasurable to watch. I certainly had some concerns in theory about a stretched image, however they are not bourne out in practice. But I digress....).
I connect a self-built external 2.5" hard drive to the device (120GB hard drive cost around £35 ish plus the case around £10 all from scan), and have loaded it with mostly high def mkv's, although some standard def avi's and some photos and mp3s too. There remains a second USB port for adding a second device if i wanted, with one port on the top and another around the back. It's hooked up to the TV by a HDMI cable (£5 from Tescos).
The interface is simple but nice and clean, it kind of reminds me of what i've seen of Sony's more recent systems of a 'cross hatch' approach - up and down through audio and video options, and left and right across other choices within those options.
The remote responds well, and the picture is really nice and easy on the eye - it looks crisp and detailed on my TV, either through the main display or when overlayed over a video image.
It has laughed at all codecs i've thrown at it so far, playing .mp4 apple files as easily as h264 codecs inside of .mkv's. The one it cant do however is DTS audio - trying to play something allows the visual stream to play whilst remaining silent. A shame, and i gather than due to hardware limiations it can't be simply added by a firmware update either, so something to be aware of.
The device itself is silent, with no moving parts and no annoying buzz of any kind. And since i use a really quiet external drive, it's effectively silent. Of course as time goes by, flash sticks will continue to grow in capacity and we'll probably be plugging in terrabyte USB sticks before you know it.
The options menu is a little limited, with video scaling limited to just 'widescreen' or 'normal' modes. It's easy however to scroll though different audio tracks if they are included, and the same is true of subtitles.
Other than that, it's simple, it works, the quality i cannot fault (i'd love to compare it directly to blu-ray but i dont have one yet), and at under £80 delivered it's brilliant.
It is, however, still somewhat of a limited device and i'm not certain it'd ever be able to become a mass market item, and this is down to getting the AV files onto the device. For the likes of us Hexites, either transcoding our own DVDs, Blu-Rays or (like myself) doing our own video editing to produce files is fair enough, but most people want a simpler approach, which either means putting a disc into a spinny thing, or (at best) downloading a simple file from itunes or similar, and it just working. And with DRM the way it is, i dont know if this device is simple enough. At least, not with current market conditions, a lack of suitable infrastructure and money-grabbing, DRM obsessed studio execs
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Originally Posted by MSIC
SCAN.care@HEXUS
