Archos AV700 review

Portable media players (PMPs) are designed to hold all your digital music, videos and photos and play them back through the built-in screen and speakers or an external display.

Some, such as iRiver's PMC-120, run Microsoft's Portable Media Center, but the Archos AV700 has its own software.

The AV700 is the biggest media player we have seen. It's far too big for a pocket, but will fit in the side pocket of a bag. The size is mainly due to the 7" widescreen LCD, which is twice the size of the screens in most media players.

The screen is nowhere near as good as that of the Sony PSP or PQI Mpack P800, due to its low 480x234-pixel resolution. Images look blocky, and while this is less noticeable during video playback, horizontal lines appear across the display. The built-in speakers are reasonable, with plenty of volume.

The player's icon-driven user interface is confusing at first because of its strange button layout. The directional keypad on the left navigates through the main menus, but three buttons on the right of the screen control audio and video settings. There is no separate volume control, so turning the sound down quickly is fiddly.

The AV700 supports audio files in MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, and DivX and Windows Media Video (WMV) files. It works well as an audio player, and you can browse tracks by artist, album, title and genre. Video support is less impressive. Dragging and dropping WMV files on to the player is a haphazard technique, as it is fussy about the kind of WMVs it accepts. Windows Media Player 10 converts video to the correct format automatically, but the quality is very poor.

We had better results with DivX files. The AV700 played all our test videos, and films encoded to DivX were blocky but watchable. Converting a DVD to DivX format is complicated and takes a long time, so you're better off buying a portable DVD player for watching films on the move.

The player comes with AV input and output cables and a TV docking station with remote control, so setting it up as a media player and video recorder is simple. Video recorded in real time is reasonably good quality, but compression artefacts are obvious when playing media on a full-size TV.

Archos's AV700 is like a solution looking for a problem. Putting DVDs on to the device is painful and, even if you already have a collection of DivX films, the screen's low-resolution spoils their quality. Audio is fine, but the AV700 is far too big, heavy and expensive to use just for playing music.