Now I found online Archos Multimedia Jukebox 20GB. That seems very
nice and not expensive device. It doesn't display RAW, but I don't
need that as much. Do you know if you can zoom on JPEGs and how
long last batery (MP3, images...). Is it realiable?
thanks,
Radim
The Archos is a great gadget but far from perfect.
The thing that annoys me most about it is the battery life, Archos
quote up to 7 hours for MP3 playback on a full charge but I rarely
get this long.
The battery is also a proprietary rechargeable design which you
cannot replace yourself, and as with most rechargeables it will
wear out after so many cycles. There are 2 cells in series or
parallel which power the device. At present Archos do not have any
information on their website about what will be available to owners
once the cells' life is up, and I wouldn't be surprised if we'll
end up with a device with a dud battery that cannot be replaced.
Several Archos suppliers have tried to source a battery replacement
but it sounds as though the design was possibly a custom batch
rather than one which is freely available. I may be wrong but I
seem to remember reading about a similar issue with the Apple iPod
in that users could not get replacement battery cells for it, but
perhaps the situation has changed.
From a full charge on the Archos I'm not sure how many transfers
you'd get from a CF card before depleting power, but provided you
had a daily facility for mains powering/recharging it would
probably be OK - certainly not something you could take on a
several day jungle trek without electricity though!
BTW if you have microdrives some work with it, some don't. (My
340MB does, my 1GB doesn't)
The CF card copying is just a copy with no verification process.
The screen is quite small and reviewing images is slow so I tend
not to bother. Yes there's an element of risk involved that they
may be corrupted but I haven't had this problem personally.
Reviewing on screen on battery power would rapidly drain power too.
Limited zoom facility only. There is a TV out option (the movie
playback isn't quite VHS quality but it's quite watchable - there
are newer versions out now with better video quality, and also
there are recorder modules available which give you in effect a
digital VCR).
I think the biggest issue for most of these devices for image
playback is the size of the images we now have - a 6 megapixel JPG
will decompress to an 18MB file in Photoshop, and few of these
portable devices have much RAM. Viewing small 1-2 megapixel sized
images is I suspect what Archos thought people would be doing when
they designed the device.
As an MP3 player it works very well. The user interface is a bit
clunky, and accessing files is just like browsing a directory
structure but I think ths sound quality is pretty good (use some
different headphones though).
The standard device is not USB 2.0 capable but there's an add-on
cable which allows USB 2.0 transfers via the module interface. The
newer version of the Archos MMJB is USB 2.0 by default and comes
in 20/40GB versions with a faster processor which allows better
video recording/playback and might be a better buy and more usable
if this is important to you. No idea if battery life is any
worse/better. There's also a much larger AV340 model available
with a fair sized screen and price tag.
I think all these devices are in their infancy, and in a year or so
there'll be far more options.
Hope that helps you a bit.
When I bought the Archos there were really no cheap alternatives
for image storage freely available in UK and I think it was the
best option at the time given it's additional functionality, but
remember it's a bit of a jack of all trades rather than a dedicated
photo storage device.
RW
...something to consider for future. It would be great to have small computer that can do everything... almost... and not only device that can display images.
