Introduction

For those of us photographers who like to take hundreds of photos while we’re out and about in the country it can be quite a bind to have to carry around a laptop when we want to take our pictures off of our memory cards and onto a hard drive. Admittedly you could go out and pay over the odds for a 4GB flash card but not everyone can afford such high level cards at the moment. In steps Epson with a fantastic little device called the P-2000 (rubbish name aside). The Epson P-2000 is basically a 40 GB hard drive which allows you to not only store photos, but also play music and movies. The best bit though is that it also has the ability for you to plug in your Compact Flash or SD Memory cards into the top of the device and copy them directly to the P-2000. The P-2000 also supports other memory cards via a CF adapter that is available separately.

Stunning quality photos, movies and music in the palm of your hand

There’s a great new way for photographers and media lovers to store, view and share digital photos, movies and music. The Epson P-2000 is compact and makes a big impact thanks to the crystal clear 3.8” Photo Fine colour display, 40GB hard drive and long battery life.

Mobile photo, movie and music player

The Epson P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer is a great new way to store, carry around and share your photos, music and movies. With its amazing 3.8” bright colour LCD and music playback features, this compact stylish device gives media lovers and photographers sound and vision without boundaries. Now you can have handheld digital movie screenings, slideshows or listen to your favourite music wherever you are!.

There’s room for serious media collections on the 40GB hard drive, while a long battery life ensures plenty of non-stop action. The Epson P-2000 is compatible and connectable with digital cameras, camcorders and computers. You can even screen on a TV and print directly on Epson USB DIRECT-PRINT compatible printers.

Key Features

• 3.8 high-definition TFT colour screen
• Outstanding picture quality from PhotoFine LCD technology - 212 pixels per inch
• Compact, lightweight and slim - 142mm x 23mm x 91.5mm and weighs 415 grams
• Download from CompactFlash, SD, XD, Memory Stick, Smart Media and MMC memory cards¹
• Connects directly to PC or TV for larger screen viewing
• Prints directly on 10 x 15, A4, 5 x 7 or 4 x 6 formats on compatible Epson printers

¹XD, Memory Stick, Smart Media and MMC memory cards supported with optional adaptor

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The P-2000

Why is this so great you may ask? Well if any of you are photographers it means you can clear your memory card off and start taking more photos, all of your photos will then be stored on the P-2000 hard drive and be easily put back onto your PC or Mac when you return home. I personally find it really great to use outdoors, as I don’t have to carry around my laptop andI can just keep the much smaller P-2000 in my photography bag and bring it out when needed.

But the best is still to come. The screen is fantastic. The screen is a 3.8” high-definition TFT colour screen, it displays your photos in 640x480 and is as good as the Sony PSP screen in my opinion. The screen itself is much larger than the ones you will find on the back of your camera, so it becomes easier for you to check our your photos while out and about with your camera and you can see them in a crispness not available on most photo views like the Nikon Coolwalker.

The P-2000 supports the main photo formats, JPEG, TIFF and most importantly RAW. It also supports movie formats MPEG-4 and Motion JPEG, but it can convert AVIs and MOV files. Finally it supports MP3 and AAC for music playback. In my views the Epson P-2000 is a much better portable media center than anything Microsoft has come out with so far, baring the ease of use in terms of getting movies and music onto your player is on a Microsoft device.

Displaying images on the P-2000 is easy, if you have already transferred some off of your memory card, you just use the clear menu and click on the “Saved Data” icon, this brings up an album style layout with thumbnails of all the images you have copied over, all you then do is click on the one you want to view by using the 4-way ring controller on the right hand side of the device. If you have not transferred any photos off of a memory card you can do so really easily, all you do is plug in the card, then select the “Memory Card” icon on the home screen, this then brings up a memory card operation screen which gives you three options.

The options are “Copy Data from Memory Card”, this simply copies all of the images off of the card and places them into the “Saved Data” folder. The next option is “Create Album After Copying Data” this is just what it says, the P-2000 allows you to create photo albums. You will then be able to create a new album or use an existing one to transfer your photos to. You can however create albums any time you like through the P-2000 and it is really easy to do so, I was able to move images from the “Saved Data” folder to a new album I created called “Flowers” in a few seconds. Albums you create can then be turned into shortcuts. Shortcuts are thumb nailed folders that appear on the main home screen of the P-2000, you can click on the Shortcut to take you directly to the folder of your choice.

As with any device like this you can delete the items you copy onto it (i.e you can delete folders or separate images,) but the good thing here is that you can also select individual images or folders to protect through the menu button on the P-2000. All you do is select the image or folder, press menu and click on LOCK this means the item cannot be deleted accidentally or by anyone else.

There are a lot of other things you can do, for example: you can personally select what thumbnail appears on each folder in your albums, or let the P-2000 choose a random one, you can run slideshows in albums to show off your photos to friends and you can even connect it up to your TV if you wanted to show off the photos you have, the good thing here is that because the image on you P-2000 is a perfect copy off of you memory card, it hasn’t been downgraded so it will look good on the TV compared to how Microsoft’s Portable Media Centers work.

The P-2000 also supports USB Direct-Print compatible printers, you just connect it to your printer via USB and then select the image you want to print off via the P-2000 menus, it then gives you the option of paper quality and sizes along with various layout options, you can select more than one image to print at the same time too. Finally if you want to sit down and show the device off to friends through a slideshow you can connect the P-2000 up to a stand that comes in the package and sit it down on a table or desk, quite neat

The P-2000 isn’t the fastest device I’ve used, when viewing albums it can take a while for thumbnails to be created, although the next time you enter the folder it has cached the thumbnails so they load much faster for you. Viewing a full photo can take a few seconds too, but this can be easily forgiven considering it is displaying a large sized image and downsizing it for 640x480 viewing.

Battery time is great, I was able to run a slideshow continuously for 3 hours 15 minutes from a full charge and considering no one in their right mind would do that in reality It was a good test, general usage will be much, much higher. Another plus point I have here for Epson is that they have used a universal power adapter, this is great for anyone who travels around the world to take photos as you don’t have to worry about plugging it into the wrong power source and blowing it up!

Connecting to the PC was easy; the P-2000 uses USB 2.0 so hi-speed transfers are the word here. To transfer the photos you can just enter the folder through explorer and copy it over (It’s a USB mass storage device when connected to Windows XP) or you can use the software that comes with the package, in the P-2000’s case it it is the Epson Photo 4 package. Now I’m not a big fan of that software and found it a bit of a pain, it was easy to copy images from the P-2000 to my PC but much more fiddly to copy images from my PC to the P-2000 to show off to friends, it’s something I feel could be improved in the future from Epson.

Music playback isn’t bad, and although it won’t ever replace my iPod, it is nice to be able to leave the iPod at home when taking photos and just having the P-2000 in my ear thanks to the AAC support. Movie playback is excellent too, although it is a shame that more formats are not supported.