Imation 320 GB HDD player

Hard disk Media players: the best thing since sliced bread for media junkies and shameless pirates. The concept of storing all your movies on one player, and not really needing a PC to play it back is quite cool. These little rectangular workhorses are capable of connecting to a TV, and playing back movies and music directly. So today we are looking at Imation’s offering in this segment, a 320 GB HDD media player.

Design
We have reviewed quite  a few HDD players in the past, and let’s just say that the looks of those units were, quite  simple. But this player comes out like a dashing hero in an early 90’s Bollywood flick. It has a very interesting and colorful body. Colorful because it has a translucent green hard plastic brace fixed around the chassis, probably the design USP of the product. The aluminum colored casing itself has a faux brushed metallic finish, with dark grey matte borders on the 2 sides and top panel. This top grey panel has 2 rows of small rectangular push buttons lined up neatly, typical of a TV remote.

Speaking of remotes the unit comes with a medium sized flat remote, with slightly curved sides for ergonomic assistance. Buttons here are tiny round ones as opposed to the rectangular ones on the device itself, but similar sized and neatly arranged here too. The unit comes packed in a nice CD case style carry bag, with accessories like USB cable, RCA composite cable, RCA component cable, manual, remote control and power adaptor.

Features
One look at the wires and we quickly turned the player up on itself like we would a baby for a nappy change (yes we offer nappy changing services in our spare time), and found out that there is no HDMI out. There is component video out and composite video out along with stereo audio, all in RCA avatar. BUT, this unit is capable of HD, 720p playback; it upscales your DVDs, so the absence of HDMI might not really be such an issue, we will check in that in the performance section.

The formats played are MPEG1, MPEG2 which is DVD video, MPEG4 part 2, which means the DivX/Xvid Codecs, MP3s upto 320 kbps and last but not least JPEGs. The file system supported are NTFS and FAT32 both, and space for storage, as Captain Obvious would say is 320GB, just like the name of the product..