December 22nd, 2007Philips Portable MP3 Player PMC7230 Review
It’s been a comparatively quiet year for Philips in the portable entertainment category, with the company mostly massages its touch-sensitive MP3 player line into more compact, flash-based designs. The company’s latest device, the Portable Media Center PMC7230 (30GB, $349) is quite a departure from the aforesaid players, in more ways than one. The Philips PMC takes two user-friendly features–direct video recording and the Media Center interface–and wraps them into an attractive, TV-like package. unluckily, the device doesn’t fully live up to its latent.
Smooth and simple
The Philips PMC has a truly lovely design–it reminds us quite a bit of the now-defunct Samsung YEPP YH-999 PMC, only with better controls. Like the Samsung, it’s squarer than rectangular–measuring 3.7 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches–so it looks additional like a little TV than some other PVPs do. The screen is large (3.5 inches diagonal), and the viewing angles are great; two or three people might without intricacy watch it at the same time. Underneath the screen are two five-way directional pads: one for navigating menu options (OK and four-way directionals) and one view intended for dishonest playback (play/pause, volume, and fast-forward/wind back). A normal skylight Media button resides sandwich between the two controllers plus always takes you back to the head menu. There’s an external speaker below all this, and it sounds relating to as good behavior in brain that you would appear forward to: tinny, but drivable. A power/grasp control rests in the right spine of the PMC, while various ports grace the top: a headphone jack, A/V in and out ports, and a standard mini-USB jack–nice!
As its name implies, the Philips PMC has a Windows Media Center-based interface. That is, the top menu always gives you the same variety of media selections: My TV, My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, Recordings, and Settings. The inner menus are organized into tabs designed to help you easily navigate your media. Tune, for example, has Artist, Album, Genre, Playlists, plus so on. Navigation really couldn’t be any easier. Our one complaint is that the first a small number of times we started up the device, neither of the center keys (OK and play/silence) would work, making navigation impossible. This glitch seems to have worked itself out though, and we haven’t had any problem in succeeding uses.
That sounds
It would be too harsh to say that the Philips PMC is all style and no substance, but we were definitely pregnant a better performer. Our main gripe is with the audio quality–it’s not good. Music that we transport from the PC sounded flat and overly bright, and both the mid- and low frequencies were lacking. Hip hop tracks sounded pretty appalling, while rock and down tempo songs were merely passable–and this is even through Shure E4cs. Overall, music just wasn’t very enjoyable to a set of ears that are well-known to Creative’s Zen V Plus.
Image quality for both photos and videos faired better but still wasn’t spot on. Most photos were nice and bright with good color saturation, but all suffered from blurred edges and some pixel problems. Album art in particular was very pixilated and appeared washed out. Video quality was quite good, though recorded video looked faded as well. More difficult was the sound quality. Specifically, we recorded some melody videos from a DVD, and the resultant files suffered from a crackling sound with every tapping. This additional often than not happens when the volume levels are too high, but as there be no levels settings on the PMC, there was little we could do to fix it. Shows recorded from a cable box fared a bit superior in terms of sound quality, likely due to the lack of musical content.
The rated battery life for the Philips PMC is 16 hours for audio and 3 hours for video. Neither of these numbers is awe-inspiring, but both are decent. make sure back later for CNET Labs test fallout to see how well the machine stacks up in real battery drains.
Limited features
Portable Media Center devices usually aren’t known for having a plethora of features. You get excellent syncing from Media Center PCs, playback of the three main media types (music, photo, and video), and that about covers it. The Philips PMC isn’t much diverse: it’s compatible only with Windows XP, and it doesn’t include an FM radio. Audio as well as video file type support is also limited; with WMV and MPEG4 life form the only support video types (MP3 and WMA for audio). It is, however, a PlaysForSure device; consequently it supports DRM-protected WMA files, including those from subscription services such as MTV Urge. And it’s compatible with purchased and rented video content from services such as Cinema Now and Vongo.
The Philips PMC can also record video, an ability no other PMC can currently claim. Philips provides the needed cable for this functionality, and it’s a simple matter of connecting said cable to the RCA A/V outs on your TV, rope box, or DVD player, then plugging the other end into the A/V in port on the PMC. Then, you can choose footage from the main menu and click Video in the next menu. The device automatically detects the video signal and displays it on its screen, along with instructions on how to create the footage (basically, just hit OK). Recordings are saved by date and time in the Video menu. You have the option of adjusting the recording time, quality, and resolution, but we wish it allowed for more manual control of video recording settings, such as volume levels (more on why below).
You can also use the aforementioned cable to output audio and video to your TV or stereo system by connecting the 1/8-inch plug end to the PMC’s A/V out port and the other end to your setup’s RCA inputs. Philips also includes a wall charger, a USB cable, some earbud-style headphones, a protective case, and a quick start guide.
