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08/08/2004 |
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Amplio PhotoPlayer Don Bradbury reviews a device for playing JPEG digital images on a TV screen, which can also be used as an AVI movie player and a six-way memory card reader.
While capturing high quality digital images with a suitable digicam is now easy enough, subsequently displaying them to an audience can be more of a problem. The camera’s LCD display is hardly big enough to use for a crowd of more than one and other in-camera facilities are generally inadequate for their tasks – such as thumbnail viewing. A device that would let you project your images onto a television screen could be useful - something most households have access to. The ability to play movie clips would be handy too and since the camera’s memory card is where the image and sound files will be held, the device might as well double as a digicam-to-PC memory card reader as well to further justify its cost. Throw in a remote control and both the amateur photographer and the professional presenter could be satisfied.
Enter the Amplio PhotoPlayer 3 in 1 Multimedia Box, until recently called the X-Player. While somewhat larger than your typical card reader, just two slots accommodate all card types supported, viz Compact Flash including Microdrive, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, Secure Digital and MultiMediaCard. The top features slideshow and other display controls, six power/activation LEDs, and the rear includes ports for video and audio, USB (1.1) and a power switch. Add the remote control (complete with batteries), a tiny mains power supply for the player itself, USB and video/audio leads to the TV, and an explanation leaflet, all for substantially less than £50, and we may have an interesting deal for you. In practice The device plugs into the TV’s composite video input. Setup is easy, as is operation, though the Taiwanese-English used for the manual leaves something to be desired. Just avoid the red DEL key, which can be used to delete unsuitable shots from the memory card and have a practice run. That’s the way to gain familiarity with PhotoPlayer.
The software might leave you a little confused at first, and what’s left unsaid in the instructions, such as the way to enter Preferences mode, will take you a minute to figure out (hit the Mode button and then the central Enter button). A four-way rocker switch is supplemented by four mode controls. With these you can determine the files selected, start a slideshow, escape to the menus, delete unwanted files etc. Sound JPEG graphics displayed well enough, and the range of twenty five random transitions and dissolves for the slideshow mode was good (though they were not selectable, unfortunately), but we could not get AVI sound files to play with either our still shots or the AVI movies we captured on our test digicams. Clearly some incompatibilities here then. Trying the range of five sound settings in the menus did not activate our sound files. Apparently, standard Intel-encoded AVI files play OK, according to Amplio, but your camera may not produce such files directly. Image files up to six mega-Pixels in size can be played although this may be an issue with newer cameras which often go higher. Preview mode lets you see 9 thumbnail photos at once, and it also shows you the filenames for easy selection if you need prints from some shots but not others. Zoom, pan, and rotate Page Up/Down lets you move quickly through multiple shots, and you can zoom in stages, and then pan any image. In single-slide mode you can also rotate vertical images left or right. For a slideshow, you’d be better using your image editing software to create another file with the correct orientation first. NTSC or PAL compatible for TV application, and bus-powered when used as a memory card reader, you can also use this device to project images to a monitor, of course, as with any removable drive. The power supply unit on the review kit was fitted with a two pin shaver plug, but sales units apparently come with a 13A three pin plug. We should point out that the remote control is useful in giving access to all the functions except the option menus - where you mainly set the slide timing - though you can use it to select NTSC/PAL and Photo/AVI modes directly. This makes what might otherwise be an ungainly setup of Audio/Video and power wires into an armchair job, with the wires feasibly hidden from sight provided the remote can still see the player’s receiver. The PhotoPlayer does claim to let you switch between two different types of media card that are plugged in at the same time, but we couldn’t get it to recognize a Microdrive if a SmartMedia card was in the other slot. Most users will not have two cards in use simultaneously. In conclusion Selling for a reasonable price, and running under Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP, the Amplio PhotoPlayer 3in1 Multimedia Box for TV could find wide application as a JPEG-only image projector, image selector, and multi-format memory card reader/writer, though you may have some conversion work to do if you want to play your sound files as well. Finally, make sure yours is a supported media card.
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