Epson P-6000 Multimedia Storage Viewer review

If you're serious about photography, taking your camera on a trip isn't enough: you'll also need somewhere to store all your pictures until you get back, and a way to check them on a screen bigger than a matchbox. Yet a laptop seems like overkill.

This new handheld device from Epson does the job in one pocketable package. Pop in a SD or CF memory card from your camera and you can back up your shots to its 80GB hard disk. You can also review them on a 4 inch 640x480 LCD screen. This may not seem like a particularly high resolution, but it's more legible than any camera screen, and Epson has used top-end LCD technology to give a crystal clear image with a full 16.7 million colours. For colour techies, this covers 94% of the Adobe RGB space; for everyone else, it means almost every colour your camera can record will be accurately displayed. This makes the P-6000 much more useful to photographers than typical consumer media players.

It's remarkably portable, too. Weighing just over half a kilo, and taking up hardly any space, it'll make location shooting a breeze. Build quality is superb, so there's none of the worry that comes with toting around fragile kit, and the buttons and scroll wheel with which you flick through your stored photos feel very robust. A PictBridge port lets you print photos straight to any compatible printer, without needing a PC, and if you want to keep yourself amused as well as sorting your snaps, video and audio files can also be stored and played back (there are tiny internal speakers).

For £421, you could buy a laptop or netbook with a much bigger screen, more storage and far greater versatility, so the P-6000 looks expensive. But if you want something truly portable with a screen that won't mislead you about the balance of your photos, well, pro photography equipment has never been cheap.

Author: Matthew Sparkes