July 2, 2010 at 19:58Cowon V5 HD Player Review
I honestly admit: writing about Cowon players is a pleasure - the company doesn’t make them so often that they bother, but each time it is something new and interesting, and not just new sauces for the same dish.
Well and most importantly, I am almost always sure of their quality - I have never been ashamed of their players)
In order not to be unfounded - I already dealt with Cowon S9 , D2 + , E2 and A3 , and I used the X5 model even when ... well, for a long time.
Not so long ago, I managed to get out of the captivity of my loggia - I went to St. Petersburg and Volgograd. Knowing that the road will be long enough and possibly boring, he took a player with himCowon V5 HD (apparently, in the naming of models they are not guided by anything and choose an arbitrary letter) - in fact, this is a logical continuation of the PMP-series of devices, in particular, the A3 model. But this time the player is much easier, because there is no hard drive inside. I had a younger 8GB model, although there are versions with 16 and 32GB of memory on sale. The operating system uses Windows Embedded CE 6.0.
Once again, the company approached the creation of packaging creatively - now it is a small brown platform made of cardboard, into which two boxes are inserted (pink and blue).
I put the adapter for charging in one, and in the second - the player itself and all-all-all (a wire for connecting to a computer, a cord, headphones, instructions and a mini-disk with Cowon MediaCenter).
I liked such a trifle as a lace - it harmonizes perfectly with the player itself, as well as combines the functions of a stylus and mount on the hand.
Highlights are visible in the photographs, I will just go into the details a bit. The case is made of white matte material without any inserts - fingerprints and small scratches on it are not visible and this is great. Despite the rather large dimensions, nothing deforms like "twisting" crunches - everything is assembled to the conscience, without cracks and gaps. The case also happens in black, silver and pink (in Russia there is not everything).
The screen is semi-glossy and due to its sensory properties is quite “soft”. The prints on it are visible, especially from wet hands (if you hold the player for a long time). The diagonal is slightly larger than that of HTC HD2 (4.5 '' versus 4.3 ''; and here there are 16.7 million colors), but the resolution is exactly the same - 800x480.
Some inconvenience can be caused by the frame around the screen - clicking on the corner buttons is sometimes not very convenient.
Functional elements minimum. At the back there is a speaker, on the right there are swing buttons for volume control (by default) and on the top there is a three-position switch, which in (s) turns on the device or blocks it during use.
On the left side there is a charging connector and a headphone port, as well as a reset hidden behind a hinged plug, an SD card slot and a connector for synchronizing with a computer (combined USB-HDMI). I see the latter for the first time, which means that if the original wiring is lost, it will be impossible to connect the player to the computer.
It would be better to use HDMI (mini) and miniUSB separately - at least you could charge from the computer, but for now this is done only through the equally rare power connector (the same was in the A3 model).
In four places on the case there are small plugs - a natural curiosity has made it clear that there is nothing interesting under them except the cogs. In the left corner is a dull blue LED - it flashes periodically (without interfering at all), helping to find the device in complete darkness.
It’s nice to see a hole for the lace in the player as a separate item - for some reason, many manufacturers began to forget about this pleasant trifle.
The device easily fits in your pocket and does not “pull” it - the neck is much more tired when viewing than the hand from the player. There are 10 gradations of screen brightness - I used the minimum all the time, because it is more than enough for all tasks.
Downloading takes place in two stages - after pressing the power button, it takes 5 seconds to download “Windows” (a desktop appears with three icons on the table) and another three seconds goes to load the player’s shell itself. The last first time looks very unusual and even frightening - it contains ... 27 periodically twitching icons!
But you quickly stop paying attention to it, because only 5 of them are active, they are signed and are located in the very center of the shell. It’s easier to show screenshots than to talk about everything in detail.
Media
There is a Flash player, as well as a music and video player. I don’t dabble in flash (games and applications), so I haven’t tried ... but I spent almost all the time spent in music and video.
Music The
music screen can be divided into 4 parts - two columns on the sides (on the left there are all kinds of equalizers, favorites and settings, and on the right there are buttons for controlling the track) and two central parts - the cover of the track, the music control buttons and the timeline are displayed on the left, and to the right is a playlist. All of this turned out to be extremely convenient in practice, but I’m still not very used to physically small icons. And it’s not very pleasing that it is practically impossible to control the music “blind” ... this is a problem of many devices with a touch screen and I am glad that this is not the case on S9.
I’m present all the musical settings that were in all previous models - here you have BBE-equalizer presets, and various playback options ... but most importantly - a list of supported formats, which as always is impressive: MP3 / 2/1, WMA, OGG, WAV, ASF, FLAC, TTA, APE, MPC, WV.
Video
In fact, this is the main task of the player, at least the screen size hints at it in every possible way. And, you know ... the player copes with this task perfectly) Without converting, I managed to see everything that I threw on the device with the aim of "looking", so there should be no problems in everyday life. Some mkv / mts / m2ts files were not played (the message “the file is not supported” was displayed), but they were rare instances of fragments from the test archive. Also, I did not try to play high-quality video (1080 pixels) - on the screen this is irrelevant, and to display on a large screen you need a non-standard HDMI-cable, which is not included. There is support for SMI and SRT subtitles.
Smooth video playback, no out of sync or a hint that the device is not coping - everything is fine. It’s better to look through headphones the built-in speaker is very quiet. Viewing angles are excellent from all sides except the top - if you look strongly from above, then the colors are inverted. The rest of the picture is very nice for the eyes - bright and without pixelation.
As you can already see, the decoration of the elements of the shell was also approached with a soul - in different places any characters appear every now and then. So, for example, the slider on the scroll bar of the multimedia file is made in the form of an icon of a young man who “runs” to the icon of a girl symbolizing the end of the file. Unusual ... and somehow even pushes to share viewing;)
Utility
This section contains several utilities that are unusual for such devices. This is a calculator (regular and engineering), a voice recorder (with the ability to "cut" files into parts), a value converter (length, area, volume and weight) and a utility for displaying world time (4 hours with the ability to specify the desired geography). Two more “system” icons - one switches the player to “Windows”, and the second - to the system folder. Eh, it would be better if they made a radio ...
Office
There are 4 tools here - Pictures (a very functional image viewer; support for JPG, BMP, PNG, TIF, RAW formats with the ability to view EXIF information), Documents (reader for text files up to 10mb in size, also with handful of settings), Browser(file browser, but not Windows) and Notepad (primitive drawing with 16 colors).
Upgrade magazine (# 06, June 2010, p. 33) writes about the function of setting up an RSS reader (which supposedly has to pump out news to read when connected to a computer), but I did not find this anywhere ... and some points in the article are confusing, from - for which it seems that the article was written without a device in the editorial office.
Game
Headscarf and tapeworm) In case the media content has been studied and the battery has not sat down yet. Well, or just to kill time at a lecture / subway.
Settings
There are a lot of settings, as always, but this time they are very conveniently divided into groups. It is possible to reassign the function of the “±” buttons from the volume to switch tracks (so that the player can not be pulled out of your pocket), but controlling the volume will then be inconvenient ... so there are definitely not enough two buttons on the device. But there is an alarm clock - a useful feature that is so lacking in models without an external speaker.
All menus are drawn instantly, no brakes and freezes - everything is as it should be.
I took pictures from the screen with one program, the benefit of Windows you can put a lot of things. So, climbing on the forum w3bsit3-dns.com or on the profile forummanufacturer, without problems there are various softwares for performing certain tasks - whether it's office work, drawing rooms, an alternative reader, total commanders or toys (for example, there are “heroes” - judging by the reviews, a copy of the second part). But it’s a pity that you can’t attach, for example, the functions of a navigator (no GPS) or a browser (no Wi-Fi) - but it would be great. This time, the Razer Moray +
headphones were a little upset - due to the fact that there were three pins on the plug (one due to the built-in microphone), in order to get a normal sound in both plugs, the plug had to be inserted completely. And it turned out to be inconvenient ... so I spent part of the summer in the “warm” Audio-Technica ATH-A900 - a completely different class, but there was no other.
The sound is beautiful - in the best traditions of Cowon! Crystal clear, without the slightest extra noise, very loud ... though the player couldn’t reveal the potential of the same ATH-A900 - computer cards play much louder. But what is there is enough for even the most spoiled listeners.
The battery life is pleasantly pleasing - once charging the player, I had enough for both trips (to St. Petersburg and Volgograd), although the device was not used very actively. For all the time, three films of 1.5-2 hours were watched (“Savages”, “Die, Tucker” and “Big Stan”, about 10 episodes of “How it's made” (each issue takes about 20 minutes), and the rest of the time the player I listened with the screen turned off, so I dare to suggest that in music mode the player will easily work out the 40-45 hours promised by the manufacturer, and in video mode - 10-12 hours.
It's nice that the device fit perfectly into the case from under the hard drive from Verbatim, since the latter is perfectly dispensed with without the case.
I don’t post the photo of the player in my hand, because at the time of photographing did not cut his nails :)
Matte case, light weight, excellent assembly
Large quality screen, good viewing angles
Multimedia omnivorous
Very good, clean and loud sound
Possibility of flashing and installing third-party software
Long battery life
The interface is not well optimized for finger control
Non-standard charging port, as well as USB / HDMI; there is no video conduit in the kit (although it is listed in the configuration)
Fingerprints remain on the screen
Quiet external speaker
No radio
Price
And:
- With such devices, the case should come with the kit
- It is inconvenient without two buttons to switch tracks
The price for models of different volumes lies in the range from 9 to 15 thousand rubles - a fairly standard figure for this type of device, but still very high. In any case, the amount of memory is small - a lot more fit on the same A3 disk, and here you will have to spend at least another memory card.
Cowon has once again proved that it has not forgotten how to make good players - stability is a sign of skill. And although the V5 is not without drawbacks, it is quite possible to get along with them - if you delegate profile viewing of video and music to this device, and not demand the impossible. Therefore, buns like solitaire and voice recorders are like bonuses to complete the picture, which you just have to enjoy. But the fact that there is no radio is sad - often your own music is annoying or you sometimes want to listen to the news ... so we will wait in new firmware - as practice shows, they will be.
A practical case, a large bright screen, everything you need to get started, and all this at an average market price ... all this makes the device more than competitive and you will definitely find your own buyer. The player, by the way, managed to receive the “Product of the Year” award.
And here is another good news - on June 24, the Russian website of the company announced the launch of the “new Cowon J3 multimedia player, one of the most functional devices in its segment” - a very interesting device and maybe I'll write more about him. For the rest, he somehow reminded me of the S9 model, which I have been faithful for over a year.
Happy Friday ;) Good luck.
Well and most importantly, I am almost always sure of their quality - I have never been ashamed of their players)
In order not to be unfounded - I already dealt with Cowon S9 , D2 + , E2 and A3 , and I used the X5 model even when ... well, for a long time.
Not so long ago, I managed to get out of the captivity of my loggia - I went to St. Petersburg and Volgograd. Knowing that the road will be long enough and possibly boring, he took a player with himCowon V5 HD (apparently, in the naming of models they are not guided by anything and choose an arbitrary letter) - in fact, this is a logical continuation of the PMP-series of devices, in particular, the A3 model. But this time the player is much easier, because there is no hard drive inside. I had a younger 8GB model, although there are versions with 16 and 32GB of memory on sale. The operating system uses Windows Embedded CE 6.0.
Once again, the company approached the creation of packaging creatively - now it is a small brown platform made of cardboard, into which two boxes are inserted (pink and blue).
I put the adapter for charging in one, and in the second - the player itself and all-all-all (a wire for connecting to a computer, a cord, headphones, instructions and a mini-disk with Cowon MediaCenter).
I liked such a trifle as a lace - it harmonizes perfectly with the player itself, as well as combines the functions of a stylus and mount on the hand.
Appearance
Highlights are visible in the photographs, I will just go into the details a bit. The case is made of white matte material without any inserts - fingerprints and small scratches on it are not visible and this is great. Despite the rather large dimensions, nothing deforms like "twisting" crunches - everything is assembled to the conscience, without cracks and gaps. The case also happens in black, silver and pink (in Russia there is not everything).
The screen is semi-glossy and due to its sensory properties is quite “soft”. The prints on it are visible, especially from wet hands (if you hold the player for a long time). The diagonal is slightly larger than that of HTC HD2 (4.5 '' versus 4.3 ''; and here there are 16.7 million colors), but the resolution is exactly the same - 800x480.
Some inconvenience can be caused by the frame around the screen - clicking on the corner buttons is sometimes not very convenient.
Functional elements minimum. At the back there is a speaker, on the right there are swing buttons for volume control (by default) and on the top there is a three-position switch, which in (s) turns on the device or blocks it during use.
On the left side there is a charging connector and a headphone port, as well as a reset hidden behind a hinged plug, an SD card slot and a connector for synchronizing with a computer (combined USB-HDMI). I see the latter for the first time, which means that if the original wiring is lost, it will be impossible to connect the player to the computer.
It would be better to use HDMI (mini) and miniUSB separately - at least you could charge from the computer, but for now this is done only through the equally rare power connector (the same was in the A3 model).
In four places on the case there are small plugs - a natural curiosity has made it clear that there is nothing interesting under them except the cogs. In the left corner is a dull blue LED - it flashes periodically (without interfering at all), helping to find the device in complete darkness.
It’s nice to see a hole for the lace in the player as a separate item - for some reason, many manufacturers began to forget about this pleasant trifle.
Inclusion and work
The device easily fits in your pocket and does not “pull” it - the neck is much more tired when viewing than the hand from the player. There are 10 gradations of screen brightness - I used the minimum all the time, because it is more than enough for all tasks.
Downloading takes place in two stages - after pressing the power button, it takes 5 seconds to download “Windows” (a desktop appears with three icons on the table) and another three seconds goes to load the player’s shell itself. The last first time looks very unusual and even frightening - it contains ... 27 periodically twitching icons!
But you quickly stop paying attention to it, because only 5 of them are active, they are signed and are located in the very center of the shell. It’s easier to show screenshots than to talk about everything in detail.
MediaThere is a Flash player, as well as a music and video player. I don’t dabble in flash (games and applications), so I haven’t tried ... but I spent almost all the time spent in music and video.
Music Themusic screen can be divided into 4 parts - two columns on the sides (on the left there are all kinds of equalizers, favorites and settings, and on the right there are buttons for controlling the track) and two central parts - the cover of the track, the music control buttons and the timeline are displayed on the left, and to the right is a playlist. All of this turned out to be extremely convenient in practice, but I’m still not very used to physically small icons. And it’s not very pleasing that it is practically impossible to control the music “blind” ... this is a problem of many devices with a touch screen and I am glad that this is not the case on S9.
I’m present all the musical settings that were in all previous models - here you have BBE-equalizer presets, and various playback options ... but most importantly - a list of supported formats, which as always is impressive: MP3 / 2/1, WMA, OGG, WAV, ASF, FLAC, TTA, APE, MPC, WV.
VideoIn fact, this is the main task of the player, at least the screen size hints at it in every possible way. And, you know ... the player copes with this task perfectly) Without converting, I managed to see everything that I threw on the device with the aim of "looking", so there should be no problems in everyday life. Some mkv / mts / m2ts files were not played (the message “the file is not supported” was displayed), but they were rare instances of fragments from the test archive. Also, I did not try to play high-quality video (1080 pixels) - on the screen this is irrelevant, and to display on a large screen you need a non-standard HDMI-cable, which is not included. There is support for SMI and SRT subtitles.
Smooth video playback, no out of sync or a hint that the device is not coping - everything is fine. It’s better to look through headphones the built-in speaker is very quiet. Viewing angles are excellent from all sides except the top - if you look strongly from above, then the colors are inverted. The rest of the picture is very nice for the eyes - bright and without pixelation.
As you can already see, the decoration of the elements of the shell was also approached with a soul - in different places any characters appear every now and then. So, for example, the slider on the scroll bar of the multimedia file is made in the form of an icon of a young man who “runs” to the icon of a girl symbolizing the end of the file. Unusual ... and somehow even pushes to share viewing;)
UtilityThis section contains several utilities that are unusual for such devices. This is a calculator (regular and engineering), a voice recorder (with the ability to "cut" files into parts), a value converter (length, area, volume and weight) and a utility for displaying world time (4 hours with the ability to specify the desired geography). Two more “system” icons - one switches the player to “Windows”, and the second - to the system folder. Eh, it would be better if they made a radio ...
OfficeThere are 4 tools here - Pictures (a very functional image viewer; support for JPG, BMP, PNG, TIF, RAW formats with the ability to view EXIF information), Documents (reader for text files up to 10mb in size, also with handful of settings), Browser(file browser, but not Windows) and Notepad (primitive drawing with 16 colors).
Upgrade magazine (# 06, June 2010, p. 33) writes about the function of setting up an RSS reader (which supposedly has to pump out news to read when connected to a computer), but I did not find this anywhere ... and some points in the article are confusing, from - for which it seems that the article was written without a device in the editorial office.
GameHeadscarf and tapeworm) In case the media content has been studied and the battery has not sat down yet. Well, or just to kill time at a lecture / subway.
SettingsThere are a lot of settings, as always, but this time they are very conveniently divided into groups. It is possible to reassign the function of the “±” buttons from the volume to switch tracks (so that the player can not be pulled out of your pocket), but controlling the volume will then be inconvenient ... so there are definitely not enough two buttons on the device. But there is an alarm clock - a useful feature that is so lacking in models without an external speaker.
All menus are drawn instantly, no brakes and freezes - everything is as it should be.
I took pictures from the screen with one program, the benefit of Windows you can put a lot of things. So, climbing on the forum w3bsit3-dns.com or on the profile forummanufacturer, without problems there are various softwares for performing certain tasks - whether it's office work, drawing rooms, an alternative reader, total commanders or toys (for example, there are “heroes” - judging by the reviews, a copy of the second part). But it’s a pity that you can’t attach, for example, the functions of a navigator (no GPS) or a browser (no Wi-Fi) - but it would be great. This time, the Razer Moray +
headphones were a little upset - due to the fact that there were three pins on the plug (one due to the built-in microphone), in order to get a normal sound in both plugs, the plug had to be inserted completely. And it turned out to be inconvenient ... so I spent part of the summer in the “warm” Audio-Technica ATH-A900 - a completely different class, but there was no other.
The sound is beautiful - in the best traditions of Cowon! Crystal clear, without the slightest extra noise, very loud ... though the player couldn’t reveal the potential of the same ATH-A900 - computer cards play much louder. But what is there is enough for even the most spoiled listeners.
The battery life is pleasantly pleasing - once charging the player, I had enough for both trips (to St. Petersburg and Volgograd), although the device was not used very actively. For all the time, three films of 1.5-2 hours were watched (“Savages”, “Die, Tucker” and “Big Stan”, about 10 episodes of “How it's made” (each issue takes about 20 minutes), and the rest of the time the player I listened with the screen turned off, so I dare to suggest that in music mode the player will easily work out the 40-45 hours promised by the manufacturer, and in video mode - 10-12 hours.
It's nice that the device fit perfectly into the case from under the hard drive from Verbatim, since the latter is perfectly dispensed with without the case.
I don’t post the photo of the player in my hand, because at the time of photographing did not cut his nails :)
Control weighing
Matte case, light weight, excellent assembly Large quality screen, good viewing angles Multimedia omnivorous Very good, clean and loud sound Possibility of flashing and installing third-party software Long battery life The interface is not well optimized for finger control Non-standard charging port, as well as USB / HDMI; there is no video conduit in the kit (although it is listed in the configuration) Fingerprints remain on the screen Quiet external speaker No radio Price And:
- With such devices, the case should come with the kit
- It is inconvenient without two buttons to switch tracks
The price for models of different volumes lies in the range from 9 to 15 thousand rubles - a fairly standard figure for this type of device, but still very high. In any case, the amount of memory is small - a lot more fit on the same A3 disk, and here you will have to spend at least another memory card.
Conclusion
Cowon has once again proved that it has not forgotten how to make good players - stability is a sign of skill. And although the V5 is not without drawbacks, it is quite possible to get along with them - if you delegate profile viewing of video and music to this device, and not demand the impossible. Therefore, buns like solitaire and voice recorders are like bonuses to complete the picture, which you just have to enjoy. But the fact that there is no radio is sad - often your own music is annoying or you sometimes want to listen to the news ... so we will wait in new firmware - as practice shows, they will be.
A practical case, a large bright screen, everything you need to get started, and all this at an average market price ... all this makes the device more than competitive and you will definitely find your own buyer. The player, by the way, managed to receive the “Product of the Year” award.
And here is another good news - on June 24, the Russian website of the company announced the launch of the “new Cowon J3 multimedia player, one of the most functional devices in its segment” - a very interesting device and maybe I'll write more about him. For the rest, he somehow reminded me of the S9 model, which I have been faithful for over a year.
Happy Friday ;) Good luck.
