Epson P-4000 Multimedia review

With the 80Gb Epson viewer, we fill our pockets with pics!

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TechRadar Verdict

The P-4000 is smart and compact but big on storage space. However, even with its USB Direct Print compatibility, its versatility is limited, and the screen is still on the small side for photo viewing. For really useful portability, we'd rather spend a little extra on a budget laptop PC

Pros

  • +

    Good if you can afford it

Cons

  • -

    Terribly pricey

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Showing off digital photos isn't as easy as pulling out a paper-based photo album.

To solve this little problem Epson has come up with the P-4000. It's like a digital photo album, complete with an impressively bright and high-resolution (212ppi) 3.8-inch LCD screen, and an equally generous 80Gb built-in hard drive.

Control buttons, conveniently placed down one side of the screen, make for easy navigation of photo folders, and you can also set up virtual albums of photos from assorted folders.

True to its 'multimedia' nature, you can also use the P-4000 as a portable MP3 player and its rechargeable battery offers up to four hours of listening between charges, although this reduces to just over three hours for photo use. To load photos into the P-4000 there's a built-in card reader, but this only supports CompactFlash and SD card formats.

The Storage Viewer reader proved rather slow in our tests, taking almost four minutes to read 512Mb of photos from a high-speed CF card, and over five minutes to write them back out again. This compares unfavourably with the 46 seconds and 67 seconds, respectively, that we achieved with the same card, using a PC-based card reader.

One bonus of the P-4000 is that it can display RAW files from most cameras but, unlike its JPEG skills, this doesn't extend to zooming in on photos. Matthew Richards

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