Performance and User Feedback

The P-2000 was surprisingly good at displaying static images ?the pictures were always sharp, with bright, vivid colors. You can also zoom into the picture to get a better view of some fragment. As for negative aspects, I should note the lack of support of the JPEG Progressive format and a not comprehensive support of RAW files (particularly, the viewer doesn’t support RAW files from my Olympus). These facts limit the functionality of the viewer quite tangibly.

The video playback also is not completely impeccable. The 30fps promised by the manufacturer vanish somewhere if you press the Seek button during playback and then press Play again. In this case the video starts to advance at a sluggish pace, about 2-3 frames per second (I checked this out on the sample pre-recorded by the manufacturer). Another strange thing is that there was a hissing sound in the speaker as I was viewing a video file recorded by a Canon S1-IS digital camera at a faster speed. Speaking about the sound, I didn’t like that I had to set the sound volume to the maximum to hear at least something. The speaker is very, very quiet, so headphones would be a nice accessory to the viewer.

For our performance tests of the P-2000 we used SanDisk Ultra II CompactFlash and IBM Microdrive storage media with 1GB storage capacity. We saved the data (digital photo album) onto each of these media. After that we measured the time it takes to copy the entire album from the card onto the hard drive of the P-2000 viewer and back. Here is the diagram composed according to the obtained results:

Let me explain a few things about the diagram. The total size of the copied data is 438MB (which is almost 50% of the storage capacity of our media). The red color stands for the results during data copying from the storage card onto the P-200 drive. The orange color stands for the copying from the P-2000 viewer back onto the removable media.

This diagram gives us very clear idea of the EPSON P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer performance characteristics. You are the ones to decide if it is fast enough for your needs. Unfortunately, you cannot access the flash cards installed into the corresponding slots of this device from the PC, otherwise I would have tested the viewer card reader copy speed.

After that we tested the performance of the internal hard disk drive of the P-2000 with the help of the FC-test program. We have already discussed its major working principles and evaluation criteria many times in our previous HDD reviews, so I won’t repeat anything here. The next diagram shows the results obtained for 1, 10 and 100MB file blocks:

As for additional playback features, some control functions are lacking. For example, you cannot play a video clip in a loop or use play-lists. There are some other things missing a modern portable player can’t do without.

We were very pleased with the user’s manual, which seems to describe in detail nearly all possible issues with corresponding solutions. Yet anyway, the overall impression from the device is positive rather than negative.