Archos 405

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/0,39029995,49292598,00.htm

Reviewed 11 September 2007

Reviewed by Nate Lanxon

For those of you not prepared to shell out up to £300 for the flagship Archos multimedia player, the 605 WiFi, the French manufacturer has an affordable alternative for you.

The Archos 405 includes many of the key features of its bigger brother, such as DVD-quality video playback and DVR functionality (with the optional DVR docking station).

Design
The 405 is basically a small 605: retained are the smooth navigation buttons on the right and the superb build quality we've come to admire Archos for. Different to the 605, however, is the inclusion of the SD slot, which sits on the top of the player. There's no kickstand, though, and the screen isn't touch-sensitive, so you'll need to master the Archos navigation system.

At 89mm (3.5 inches), the screen's nicely sized, though the disappointing 320x240-pixel resolution makes it slightly lacking in sharpness.

The 405's display is nicely sized but not sharp enough for us

Features
As a music player the 405 offers the typical 'artist > album > song' organisational structure. You can also sort by genre, year of release and user rating, providing these details are within each file's ID3 tags. You'll see any album art in a right-hand column that eats about a third of the screen, along with access to context menus and album/song metadata.

Videos are sorted by file name and folders. Organisation is a simple drag-and-drop process within Windows. Context menu options allow you to delete and rename files, but you can't reorganise them on the device itself. By default, WMV and standard MPEG-4 videos only are supported. If you want to watch high quality H.264 stuff -- such as typical video podcasts -- or DVD-quality MPEG-2 videos, you'll need to pay about £15 each for the two required firmware upgrades from Archos.

The image library works in the same way as the video portion. Additionally, there's an option to view image meta-data, should you ever need to see what camera took a certain photo or what aperture the camera was configured to use. You can also browse images by the date they were taken, this being the most useful of the two options.

Finally, the TV recording function will allow you to record from your television to the 405, as well as output any video on your device to a TV. You'll need to buy the optional DVR dock (sensing the running theme?) in order to use this interesting feature, which we'll be reviewing separately.

The Archos 405 is conveniently palm-sized

Performance
With the screen's resolution being notably low, our expectations of video and image performance weren't too high. Alas, video playback is smooth and fast to load but the high quality of video supported isn't conveyed well by the poor screen. This is also true for images, which, while beautifully preserved in high-quality JPEG format, look pixellated and compressed on the 405. The display's matte finish does its best to avoid glare, however.

It's important to keep in mind this is a player that costs little in excess of £100, and super-sharp screens come at a cost. With this as a consideration, the low-ish resolution of the 405's display is at least acceptable.

Music quality is superb and up to the usual high Archos standard, though this would be a bulky choice if you're mainly after a music player. Annoyingly, after setting a song or album to play, backing up through the menu will stop the song playing. To get back to an album list or into a different mode you'll need to select the Archos home screen from a context menu. Yes, this is counter-intuitive and yes, it's frustrating.

The 2GB of internal memory is expandable to as much as 32GB with high-capacity SD cards, meaning you needn't compromise on capacity too much if you can't afford more expensive hard disk options.

Conclusion
For roughly the same price or even a little less than an 8GB Apple iPod nano (currently £129), the Archos 405 offers a large colour screen, great sound quality, support for high-resolution video and drag-and-drop management of files. Sure, the screen's not the clearest and many features require additional purchases, but for just over £100, you're getting an affordable and expandable pocket media player.

Archos really owns this price range of portable devices. As an alternative to the 405, consider saving up a little more and opting for the Archos 605 -- it really is the king and the extra cost will reward you many times over.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday