Portable media players are really starting to come of age and the latest to arrive for review, from the king of PMP manufacturers is a shining example of the art. The new Archos 604 builds upon the reputation for quality won by the AV500 model and trims the offering to make mobile video viewing a real possibility. Perhaps enough to convince us that maybe we should even splash our own cash on a PMP!

So what do you get for your money with the Archos 604 PMP? For a start the unit packs a large 30gb hard drive onto which you can squeeze some 30 or so movies, encoded at 1mbps 640 x 480 resolution and it manages to keep this inside the 130 x 78 x 17mm chassis, which weighs a solid 255 grams. The 604 feels like a solid slab of technology, the metal and plastic combination not only looks classy, but the overall quality of the unit is something you feel through your finger tips as much as see with your eyes

The large 4.3” 16:9 TFT screen looks fantastic and far better than its native 480 x 272 pixels suggest. The backlight is good and strong and it has a surprisingly good angle of acceptance meaning you do not have to sit dead ahead of  the screen. It’s even possible to set the unit up on a desk using the inbuilt kick stand, which helps keep the angle just right as long as you don’t want to use any of the base mounted connectors. The right-hand edge of the screen is taken up by the main control set which includes the menu key and 4 way selection keys plus the housing for the small inbuilt speaker. The upper edge houses the power button and the LCD / TV toggle switch while the left hand edge house the indicator lights for power / charge / HDD activity and TV / LCD use, plus a small microphone.

As mentioned the lower edge houses the main connectors for docking stations such as the Archos DVR dock and travel dock, plus the main USB connector. For our review we set up the unit in its simplest package, with the connector supplied for USB connection to a host PC. Normally this is where the tale of woe starts as we find formats that won’t play and how we fight with the supplied transcode software and it takes all day to get one movie to play in poor quality.

However the Archos 640 is different as it claimed to support Windows Media files natively up to main level profile at DVD quality. Great, so we put it straight to the test with a ripped copy of Oceans Eleven in WMV @ 1mbps 640 x 480. It pushed over the USB connection in just under 4 minutes (roughly an 850mb file) and was quickly picked up once we switched the Archos back from USB to playback. Then expecting the worst we hit play and the screen was filled within the opening scenes as Danny Ocean leaves prison, it may not sound impressive but most PMP’s fail this simple test, insisting that you jump through hoops before files will play. The AV 604 supports WMV, MPEG-4 Avi up to DVD quality, plus with some plugins it will also handle H.264 with ACC audio and MPEG-2 up to 10mbits @ML.

We watched a variety of WMV files encoded at different bitrates and were impressed by the quality and reliability of replay and also the audio quality when using headphones. There is a small speaker built into the unit but even at its highest volume setting it is far too quite to be of any real use. The full video control is present so it’s easy to skip through movies and to pause and then resume watching later, the interface shows thumbnails of each clip plus plays the beginning of the clip when you highlight it.

Archos have ensured that while the 604 is a consummate video player it is also a fully featured MP3 player albeit a bit on the big side if you only wanted it for that. Navigation is again via a folder structure but this time you can search via artist or album as well as based on the folders. The Archos 604 handles MP3, WMA (DRM protected as well) and WAV files up to 320kbps, it will also take play lists and even album art makes it across to feature in the user interface making the most of the large screen. Playback controls are quite good but not as quick to use as an iPod but we had no real complaints about performance, audio quality is first class via the earphones and with arrange of files we proved the unit very robust.

It is a shame that more audio formats are not catered for as you can’t play your ACC files without finding some plugins on the web and there is currently no support for Ogg Vorbis. The PMP capabilities do go further with a rather good photo viewer that can show JPEG’s and PNG files and also a PDF viewer.

But that really is only half the capabilities, those are all about playback but the 604 is also a recorder and is able to take in live vide and audio using the optional DVR station.  Here you can either set manual recordings to be made from your TV or Set-Top box or use Yahoos online EPG which can then push record settings onto the 604 when connected up to a host machine. The pervious AV500 came with these features as standard but Archos have seen fit to make these optional as part of a kit in order to keep the entry level price down and the record options are greyed out until you plugin the options.

Archos supplied us a DVR station which is designed to make recording live video sources much easier, while this is an option we’d strongly recommend going for this if you intend to fill up your 604 this way. It enables the 604 to sit snugly in a cradle and be operated by remote control (included in the DVR pack) plus comes with a host of connectivity cables and adaptors that should hook up to almost any source or viewing device. Recordings are made in MPEG-4 640 x 480 pixels and frankly look very good indeed, these can also be exported back to the PC for safe storage should you start to fill up the 30gb of on board storage.

Battery life for a Portable Media Player can be a real issue, we managed to squeeze just over 4 hours of WMV playback out on a single charge and nearly 14 hours of continuous MP3 playback. The lithium Ion battery is charged via the Archos adaptor which in turn can be plugged up to a powered USB port. This is about average for a PMP and a good show allowing you to get at least 1 whole movie or possibly two played back before the battery fails, but it won't manage a flight to New York which should be the measure for a video player sold in the UK.

Priced at an attractive £225 the Archos 604 is a real alternative to an iPod for those of us who really want to watch video on a reasonable sized screen and with no record features and transfer via USB this makes an excellent companion for your DVD ripper. Add another £70 for the DVR station and the record features light up making it more useable but exposing that the integration with a set-top box is fairly basic, plus we are now talking £300 or more.

For us the basic package is spot on, a great screen, file compatibility, good audio quality and video playback to die for all for £225, we think Archos has cracked it and the PMP is about to lift off.

More Archos Reviews

Published - 05/11/2006

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