Epson P3000 Mini Review
Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 5:47 pmNot much interest on this thread, but here's a mini review anyway 
Build and Ergonomics
I have never used an Epson multimedia device so this is my first experience with the Epson P series.
The Epson P3000 is solidly built. I previously had a Hyperdrive PD70X and that felt like a toy compared to the Epson. The unit fits on your hands perfectly and the buttons on the right hand side of the unit are easily accessible with your thumb, the unit is perfectly operatable with your right thumb – nice work from Epson.
When SD and CF cards are inserted, the cards are flush, so there’s no chance of accidently bumping the card, this was a pet peeve I had with the PD70X, it would only fit the card half way.
Screen
The 4.0” screen is absolutely amazing. The colour is vibrant and images are sharp. The LCD is quite bright, but user adjustable. It would have been nice if the screen was widescreen so when viewing movies it would be shown properly, but this unit really is designed as a photo storage display and not playing movies. The unit supports both SRGB and Adobe RGB colour space.
Software
As of the current firmware (V01.10.01.00), the Epson supports all Canon DSLR raw files bar the new Canon 1D Mark III, I have emailed Epson to see if they will release a new firmware to support newer camera’s, but I haven’t received a reply just yet.
Apparently previous models weren’t able to zoom on raw images, but you can definitely zoom on raw images on the P3000, you can zoom to 50% and 100% only, but with JPGs, you can zoom at 50%, 100%, 200% and 400%.
The P-3000 is pretty easy to navigate through the menus and everything pretty self explanatory. There are 8 menus:
Multimedia
The P3000 accepts the following video files: MOV, AVI, DivX, ASF, MPEG1/2, MPEG 4, unfortunately from my initial tests, the P3000 doesn’t seem to play any divx files that are encoded using AC3 audio.
The P3000 accepts the following audio files: MP3, WMA, WAV and M4A (I’m not even sure what that file is :S)
The one thing that disappointed me about the P3000’s multimedia capabilities is the sound, the maximum volume is a joke both with headphones and through the external speaker, the external speaker is only a mono speaker, it would have been good to have stereo speakers, but as I’ve mentioned, this device really is designed as a PSD, anything else is really a bonus.
Bottom line, it has decent multimedia features, but if I wanted to listen to music, I’ll grab an Ipod and “portable movies” just doesn’t make sense to me on such a little device, maybe music video’s but not really movies. For music video purposes, this unit is quite reasonable.
Battery Life
From the time I’ve had the P3000, I have only tested the battery life in terms of how many GB’s I can copy onto the unit before it dies on me. I managed to get 47gb copied on to the P3000 before I got the message to charge the battery.
I copied 22gb’s before the battery icon showed half, I got to 36gb and the icon showed ¼ left and every time I copied a card from that point onwards, I got a message saying “battery power is low, backup may stop before completion”. I kept copying until I reached 47gb and it just shut down.
47gb is pretty much just copying 2gb cards over and over, so there wasn’t much photo viewing or anything like that, I would imagine, the battery life will be much less if you were viewing and copying photo’s over the course of a week or so.
That being said, 47gb off one charge is bloody good, I managed to get 20gb off one charge from my PD70X, once I get the third party battery that I’ve ordered, I’ll test it out again and see the battery life on that.
Speed
The only cards I have at my disposal right now are my 2gb Ridata PRO 155x and 1gb Sandisk Ultra II cards (I’ve ordered 4gb Extreme III’s but they are still in the mail).
The P3000 is definitely nowhere near as fast as the PD70X where it could almost copy 1gb/min. In my tests, I copied 2gb worth of 20D raws 3 times and they both were around the 5:40 – 5:45 min mark. I tried 2gb worth of 5D raw+jpg and it was the almost the same results as the 20D files (between 5:40 and 5:45). The same card was copied on to my computer and it took 4:21 mins using a normal USB 2.0 card reader.
When copying the 1gb Ultra II’s, it took roughly 2:20 mins to copy the whole card over.
These figures are not scientific, but I copied the 2gb cards about 20 times and the 1gb cards about 4 times and during those times, all the cards copied roughly seconds from each other.
Like I said, I don’t have access to any Extreme III or IV cards so I’m not sure whether or not the speed of the cards will make a difference, but I’ll update once I get my cards.
While the P3000 isn’t super fast, it’s definitely not as slow as the P2000 from the review’s I’ve read online.
Conclusion
Overall, I’m happy with this unit, there is a premium price tag on this device, but like with everything you get what you pay for. The screen is unbelievable, its easy to use, it’s fast enough for my use and the battery life is quite good. Sure it’s no Cowen (for video’s) and its no Ipod (for music), but the multimedia features on the P3000 is what I believe an added bonus considering I purchased this device knowing what I was using it for – photo storage.
Build and Ergonomics
I have never used an Epson multimedia device so this is my first experience with the Epson P series.
The Epson P3000 is solidly built. I previously had a Hyperdrive PD70X and that felt like a toy compared to the Epson. The unit fits on your hands perfectly and the buttons on the right hand side of the unit are easily accessible with your thumb, the unit is perfectly operatable with your right thumb – nice work from Epson.
When SD and CF cards are inserted, the cards are flush, so there’s no chance of accidently bumping the card, this was a pet peeve I had with the PD70X, it would only fit the card half way.
Screen
The 4.0” screen is absolutely amazing. The colour is vibrant and images are sharp. The LCD is quite bright, but user adjustable. It would have been nice if the screen was widescreen so when viewing movies it would be shown properly, but this unit really is designed as a photo storage display and not playing movies. The unit supports both SRGB and Adobe RGB colour space.
Software
As of the current firmware (V01.10.01.00), the Epson supports all Canon DSLR raw files bar the new Canon 1D Mark III, I have emailed Epson to see if they will release a new firmware to support newer camera’s, but I haven’t received a reply just yet.
Apparently previous models weren’t able to zoom on raw images, but you can definitely zoom on raw images on the P3000, you can zoom to 50% and 100% only, but with JPGs, you can zoom at 50%, 100%, 200% and 400%.
The P-3000 is pretty easy to navigate through the menus and everything pretty self explanatory. There are 8 menus:
- My Music – a collection of your music files
- View Rated Files – displays all photo’s that is rated
- My Videos – a collection of your video files
- My Photos – a collection of you photos
- Backup Files – this is the location of where your files go to when you copy your memory card over, each directory is sorted by current date and folder number eg 30072007.001
- Memory Card – allows you to browse through your memory card without having to copy the files into the unit.
- USB Device – allows you to browse/copy another USB device, eg thumb stick or USB hard drive (unfortunately I wasn’t able to browse any of my external hard drives, it seems the Epson P3000 can’t power an external hard drive the doesn’t have its own power source, if I still had my PD70X, I’m sure you would be able to copy straight to it as it has its own power source, or if there’s another Epson P3000, you could copy straight to it, it did see my thumb stick quite easily though and I was able to browse and copy to it).
- Settings – need I say more?
Multimedia
The P3000 accepts the following video files: MOV, AVI, DivX, ASF, MPEG1/2, MPEG 4, unfortunately from my initial tests, the P3000 doesn’t seem to play any divx files that are encoded using AC3 audio.
The P3000 accepts the following audio files: MP3, WMA, WAV and M4A (I’m not even sure what that file is :S)
The one thing that disappointed me about the P3000’s multimedia capabilities is the sound, the maximum volume is a joke both with headphones and through the external speaker, the external speaker is only a mono speaker, it would have been good to have stereo speakers, but as I’ve mentioned, this device really is designed as a PSD, anything else is really a bonus.
Bottom line, it has decent multimedia features, but if I wanted to listen to music, I’ll grab an Ipod and “portable movies” just doesn’t make sense to me on such a little device, maybe music video’s but not really movies. For music video purposes, this unit is quite reasonable.
Battery Life
From the time I’ve had the P3000, I have only tested the battery life in terms of how many GB’s I can copy onto the unit before it dies on me. I managed to get 47gb copied on to the P3000 before I got the message to charge the battery.
I copied 22gb’s before the battery icon showed half, I got to 36gb and the icon showed ¼ left and every time I copied a card from that point onwards, I got a message saying “battery power is low, backup may stop before completion”. I kept copying until I reached 47gb and it just shut down.
47gb is pretty much just copying 2gb cards over and over, so there wasn’t much photo viewing or anything like that, I would imagine, the battery life will be much less if you were viewing and copying photo’s over the course of a week or so.
That being said, 47gb off one charge is bloody good, I managed to get 20gb off one charge from my PD70X, once I get the third party battery that I’ve ordered, I’ll test it out again and see the battery life on that.
Speed
The only cards I have at my disposal right now are my 2gb Ridata PRO 155x and 1gb Sandisk Ultra II cards (I’ve ordered 4gb Extreme III’s but they are still in the mail).
The P3000 is definitely nowhere near as fast as the PD70X where it could almost copy 1gb/min. In my tests, I copied 2gb worth of 20D raws 3 times and they both were around the 5:40 – 5:45 min mark. I tried 2gb worth of 5D raw+jpg and it was the almost the same results as the 20D files (between 5:40 and 5:45). The same card was copied on to my computer and it took 4:21 mins using a normal USB 2.0 card reader.
When copying the 1gb Ultra II’s, it took roughly 2:20 mins to copy the whole card over.
These figures are not scientific, but I copied the 2gb cards about 20 times and the 1gb cards about 4 times and during those times, all the cards copied roughly seconds from each other.
Like I said, I don’t have access to any Extreme III or IV cards so I’m not sure whether or not the speed of the cards will make a difference, but I’ll update once I get my cards.
While the P3000 isn’t super fast, it’s definitely not as slow as the P2000 from the review’s I’ve read online.
Conclusion
Overall, I’m happy with this unit, there is a premium price tag on this device, but like with everything you get what you pay for. The screen is unbelievable, its easy to use, it’s fast enough for my use and the battery life is quite good. Sure it’s no Cowen (for video’s) and its no Ipod (for music), but the multimedia features on the P3000 is what I believe an added bonus considering I purchased this device knowing what I was using it for – photo storage.
I don't think I feel the need to spend a whole bunch of money on a