The Archos AV700 is a real contradiction, it is both big and beautiful, normally we'd pile into a gadget for being too large but the AV700 which measures 209 x 107 x 19 mm and weighs a whopping 590 grams looks stunning and feels great to hold. It's like a solid slab of tech styled in sleek silver and sporting that all important 7" screen which displays 262k colours and has a resolution of 480 x 234 pixels. The package also contains the all important TV Pod, this provides all the I/O ports you need and is essential for connecting the 700 up to record a line signal and also to connect to a TV or Plasma for sharing on a big screen. We'll get to covering the AV700's video quality later in the review but to get things going we needed to record some media.

This has been the Achilles heel of previous players by many manufacturers, they often harked back to the dark ages of VHS with no timer function or way of controlling the tuner to change channels. Archos have at least corrected this enabling both timed recordings and also given the TV Pod an infa red sender enabling it to control your set-top box. We chose to connect the Archos to our Sony Freeview box and placed the infa red eye over the IR port on the DTT unit, after selecting the brand (Sony) the process started and the AV700 set about tuning our box?

There are other options for helping to control the AV700, you can for instance use the MY Yahoo TV feature and browse schedules on a PC then download them to the AV700 over the USB link. This is great idea but sadly poor execution means that most users will give up somewhere in the middle of the configuration process and even when you do succeed the manual process of pushing over the record schedules reminds you could just have put the date and time straight into the Archos to start with.

With our Sony DTT unit under control we made a few test recordings and despite this all feeling a little eighties compared to the simplicity of a Sky+ box we soon had some MPEG4 recordings to playback on the 700. We also wanted some downloaded content and perhaps even a ripped DVD to try out as these are 2 of the more common sources that consumers what to use with a PMP. We had a pre ripped copy of Father Ted in Divx 4 which took a while to push over the USB 2.0 link but surprised us in playing first time. As with most PMP's there is no way of knowing what will and won't play, Archos say that MPEG 4, Divx 4/5, AVI and WM9 (both DRM and no DRM) will play but as always resolution and bit rates have a big say in that.

Many of the downloaded files either exceeded the maximum bit rate the AV700 could handle or where a much higher resolution than the 800kbits WM9 that seems to work ok. You can resort to using the supplied conversion software but this always adds another stage and just takes PMP's over the edge of usability where most gadget fans start to see them as a pain. That said we had managed to successfully download media and also record from a set-top box allowing us to check out the playback quality and features of the Archos.

The model on review here packs a 100gb drive meaning it can hold around 400 hours of video or 55,000 audio tracks, the large screen looks the part but uses a rather strange resolution of 480 x 234 which doesn't really make the most of the 7 inches of real estate and leaves the graphics looking a little clunky. The screen is certainly bright but this does lead to the colours looking a little washed out and the spacing between pixels does make the image seem a bit blocky even when we used our ripped DVD as a source. Playing some fast moving action shots we downloaded in WM9 the unit did seem to produce artefacts which were quite visible on the large expanse of LCD screen, this is a real shame as we expected the screen size to be complimented by high quality image display.

Driving the Archos AV700 is pretty simple, even with lots of audio and video tracks on the unit the Dpad style control is able to swiftly search through the catalogue and thumbnails of the video or album art make things easier. In fact its a great interface for navigating an MP3 collection which the Av700 can play with aplomb, plus it also handles WMA and WAV formats and we were quite surprised and happy to see that Archos do not supply a daft equalizer or any other gimmicks, its just a good solid MP3 player.

Watching a few episode of father Ted we soon got settled and started to forget about analysing the picture quality, the large screen does make for a more convincing experience and it has more in common with watching a DVD on a laptop than your usual PMP experience. The inbuilt speakers do their best but weren't expecting a lot form the small 1" drivers and they do sound lifeless and relatively quiet, the supplied headphones are much better but they aren't the best ergonomically making a whole movie a bit uncomfortable.

We decided to use the TV pod and connect the Av700 up to our 26" TFT screen to see what the top end recordings looked like and we were surprised as the full 640 x 480 it's capable of recording looks halfway decent even on such a large screen. There are a few other extras including a good photo album tool which also compliments the 700's ability to connect to a digital camera via its USB host and suck off pictures, ideal if you are on holiday and fill up the cameras storage card. There is also Archos's own gaming engine "Mophun" but we struggled to find any games for it and those we did were decidedly pants.

You would think all these features and a large bright screen would take their toll on the battery life, but we managed to get a full 34 hours of MP3 replay and just under 4 hours of video replay from a single charge.

priced at £330 for the 40gb version and another £200 for the 100gb version we'd have to recommend the smaller hard disk capacity over its larger brother. Overall the Archos AV700 is a bit of a big beast and carting it round does challenger the word portable to it's limits. The improved recording capabilities make it useable but sadly there is still work to do both in the scheduling of recordings and the downloading of media for the device. The big screen is worth the extra cash over rivals but don't expect a high resolution, we really wanted a 640 x 480 resolution for a screen of this size and that fact we didn't get it makes the AV700 less than perfect and will probably mean it doesn't sell in vast numbers.

So the day of the PMP has been advanced a little by the AV700 but mass market appeal for devices like the Archos is still a way off.

More Archos Reviews

Published - 04/12/2005

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