Epson P-4000 review

If you're a professional or keen amateur photographer, you'll know that it doesn't take many high resolution images to fill even the largest memory card.

Unless you carry a clutch of them around with you, you'll need to copy images to a computer whenever you need to free up some storage, which isn't particularly convenient.

The Epson P-4000, on the other hand, is. It's billed as a 'multimedia storage viewer', which is a roundabout way of saying that it's a battery-powered 80GB hard disk with slots for CompactFlash and SD memory cards.

The idea is simple - pop a full memory card into one of the slots and you can copy its contents to the P-4000's hard disk, freeing up the card for further use. You can then transfer the images to a PC at your leisure, via the USB 2 connection. This alone doesn't quite justify the price tag, of course, but the Epson offers quite a bit more in the way of features.

The first of these is a colour screen used for displaying photographs. Now we've seen a fair few screens at Computer Buyer, but the one used on the P-4000 is by far the brightest, clearest and sharpest we've ever seen on a device this size. Its 3.8in diagonal and 640 x 480 resolution combine to give an image that is quite simply breathtaking, and if you're looking for a way to show off your photographs while you're still shooting them, only the best laptop display will give a better image than this.

The P-4000 can display the JPEG images that most compact digital cameras capture, but it can also cope with the super-high quality RAW images produced by professional cameras too. There is a limit to the resolution of the image that can be displayed, but since this is 17.8 megapixels, it's unlikely to create a problem for many.

Once copied to the Epson's hard disk, images can be organised into albums and displayed at varying levels of zoom, as well as a slideshow, with or without the EXIF data that most digital cameras output. And when you're not using it to view photos, you can also listen to MP3s or watch MPEG-4 movies, which is a handy extra.