Epson’s multimedia storage viewers have come a long way since making their first appearance in 2004 when digital photography was just starting to take off. The latest in the line, the P-6000 with its 80 GB hard disk, provides a portable solution for more active photographers looking for instant back-ups, and an excellent screen to review pictures on.

 

 

When you’re done shooting simply pop your SD or CF card into the P-6000, from here you can review your pics, and back-up your images onto its hard disk. Viewing images are a joy since the 4” Photo Fine Premia LCD screen can display 16.7 million colours, and covers 94% of the Adobe RGB color gamut. One of the problems faced by photographers is checking focus on the back of a dSLR, since most screens simply aren't crisp enough. The P-6000 manages to cram 640 x 480 pixels in the 4” screen , which makes it really handy to zoom into pics to check focus (although the six year old P-2000 crammed the same amount into a 3.8” screen, giving even more pixels per inch). This P-6000 also has a tethered mode, where you connect the P-6000 to your camera to view images instantly on the bigger 4” screen and also to save your photos directly onto the hard disk if you’re running out of space.

 

 

Going through rather large image files is part of the job for the Epson, and speed-wise it’s no slow poke when it comes to rendering them. Something which can't be said of its user-interface, which is a little basic and sluggish. Pics can be scrolled through either via the four-way control button or the handy scroller on the side. What we would have appreciated is an accelerometer, since there is no way to tilt portrait photos quickly into landscape mode. When selecting your best pics, they can be marked through a five star rating system, and then filtered to display only those with a certain rating.

 

 

The P-6000 isn't called a multimedia storage viewer for nothing, since it also takes care of MP3s (which can be used as slide-show background music), and on the video side also of MPEG-4, Motion JPEG and H.264/AVC SVGA. In the age of HD the absence of an HDMI port is a big short coming, although you can connect it to TV via a third party AV cable. The P-6000 can also be connected directly to PictBridge enabled printers.

 

 

The Epson P-6000’s biggest obstacle is its rather hefty retail price, marked at R5880. Just a quick browse over the latest notebooks will get you a 15” model with 160 GB worth of hard-disk space for less than that. Granted it is not as portable as the Epson, but hey, you get a whole notebook. It will also be interesting to see if the new Apple iPad makes an impact on photographers looking for a quick way to review pics. Call 011-465-9621 or visit www.epson.co.za for more info.