Archos AV 500 — the First Glance

Thomas — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 01:47:47 +0000

Archos is one of the major players in the portable personal video recorder (PVR) market. Last year, it delivered AV 500, which might be the best hybrid PVR device on the market. Plus, it is very handy for amateur digital photographers to use it as an external hard drive backing up photos from memory cards.

AV 500 weighs 9 ounces and measures 3×4.9×0.7 inches. It is a little bit larger than a normal PDA. Its 16×9 4-inch wide screen has the resolution of 480×272, which has more horizontal lines than the famous Apple iPod Video (320×240), but less than the new Creative Zen Vision and Espon P-2000. The latter two both have 640×480 and have relative smaller LCD screens. Will higher resolution play a major role in such a small display area? You guess.

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As a PVR, AV500 deals with JPEG, WAV, WMA, MP3, AVI (including DivX, for both NTSC/PAL). It is bundled with bunch of sample image/audio/video files. It could output video at the best DVD quality when hooked up with external displays. It is designed to transfer video in a tranditional VCR fashion. Hook it up with a video output via its TV docking pod. Start to record video on AV500. The recording time is 1:1.

AV500 has two USB ports: USB A is used for accessaries, such as a memory card reader; USB B is for computer connection. USB A is operated as USB 1.1 (full-speed USB 2.0) while USB B is hi-speed USB 2.0. In my test, it took 8-9 minutes to transfer 424MB data from a hi-speed USB memory card. It is much better than iPod, but still behind EPSON P2000. Its battery life is superb — 4.5 hours for video on built-in LCD — far better than 2-hour from iPod Video and 3-hour from P2000. It is definitely not a storage device for pro-photographer, but amateurs definitly could enjoy its much lower dollar to gigabyte ratio: < $5 per GB.

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Archos AV 500 — the First Glance