Asus O! Play Air HDP-R3 media player

HD media players have sprung out of every rabbit hole in wonderland, the concept has proliferated faster than you can imagine. It’s a great concept no doubt, who needs those bulky old DVD players anyways now that we have HDD form factors that play even our high def 1080p video files? But all of them don’t play these files alike, and that’s where we come in to separate the quality out, and today we have Asus latest offering up for examination. It’s called the O! Play Unlimited, and going by the fact that its parent brand has impressed us in many ways previously, let’s not waste any more time in checking this one out.

Design
The device is typical in that it resembles uncannily a 1 TB Hard disk these days, but functionally it has no storage. You have to connect your own storage to it. The top and bottom edges are matte finished, with 3 of the 4 sides covered by a glossy black strip. The lone backside is again matte, and has the connections located therein. The features of this player are quite good, besides the regular connectors of USB 2.0 we also have eSATA, which is MUCH faster than the former. There is also Memory card reader support.

Beside playing off storage this unit has other capabilities, and those have to do with a certain something called the internet. Besides playing HD files off a remote storage with Wi-Fi (upto Wi-Fi ‘n’), this unit also connects to the world wide web and accesses the Youtube, NBC, Fox sports, PICASA, Flickrs of the world. Not only that it also syncs to Internet radio stations, loads of them (according to the specs).

One of the most important things in this category of products is file format compatibility. The more the merrier, for sure; Asus sure gets this, and have tried to incorporate lots of audio video formats dear to our hearts. Check specs

Specs
Input:

•  DC Power In
• 1xUSB 2.0 Port
• 1xUSB 2.0 / eSATA Combo Port
• RJ-45 LAN Port
• Card readers CF, SD+MMC, MS+MS Duo
• 802.11n Wireless Networking

Output:

• Composite Video
• Composite Audio L/R
• S/PDIF Out
• HDMI 1.3

Supported Formats    

• Video: MPEG1/2/4,RM/RMVB,VC-1,H.264
• Video File: .trp,.mp4,.mov,.xvid,.avi,.divx,.asf,.wmv,.mkv,.rm,.rmvb,.flv,.ts,.m2ts,.dat,.mpg,.vob,.mts,  
  
• Audio: MP3,WAV,AAC,OGG,FLAC,AIFF,Dolby Digital AC3,Dolby Digital Plus,DTS Digital Surround,Tag ID3
• Image: JPEG,BMP,PNG,GIF,TIFF
• Subtitle: SRT,SUB,SMI,SSA,TXT(SRT)

The first thing to talk about was the menu, which had large icons arranged in a circle, which rotates around to display the main one. I would prefer a list form of UI to this any day. The color schema dn font size are alritght, no problem in readability.

The video output was sharp and crisp detail wise, it was very impressive in terms of the absence of dirty edge distortion or blurry edges in motion. The motion was stutter free almost, except in a full bitrate VOB file, which took a little while to start and sync up. The colors again were nicely saturated, we could not gauge any blotchiness or color banding, again a very impressive feat. This was observed in even 1080p MKVs.

Setting up wireless connections is as easy as selecting it from the list of detected networks, and entering your password. HD files streamed almost flawlessly from a distance of 8 feet, with a wall in the middle. thast mpressive.

Conclusion
Rs. 10,500 excluding taxes is the rate one has to shell out, which we feel is a decent price to ask, considering the market has product similarly priced. This model has superior wireless performance, plus core playback of all formats was handled with confidence. The menu was alright; could have been less quirky, but then that’s the only complaint we have. It’s a solid player.