Review Of iAudio COWON A3
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
Are you a movie buff who likes to watch movies on the go, but feel that the iPod and the likes aren’t good enough? Are you looking for a better option, something which is much more convenient, with no video conversion hassles? Somewhere around mid 2007, we gave you an option of the Creative Zen Vision W for the same which surpassed the iPod quality in terms of video, and otherwise too; it was quite a PMP.
Today, we look at a similar offering from iAudio COWON — the A3. Will this player quench your thirst of movies on-the-go, or will it be just another fizz drink leaving you thirsty once again? You’ll find out Read on!
Package
iAudio COWON A3, Earphones, USB Cable, AV Cable, HI Quality TV Cable, Hand Strap, Leather Pouch, AC Power Adaptor, Installation CD & Manual
Features
The COWON A3 is loaded with features. Just its feature list could put many of the other PMPs around to shame, and even pinch a few UMPC in terms of its screen quality. Its 4-inch long screen has a brilliant support for 16 million colors which bring the screen to life. The previous iteration from iAudio — the COWON D2 — had a tiny screen compared to the A3. While the D2 has a touch screen, the missing feature was easily negated with the A3’s joggle lever.
The A3 can play 720p HD content. It’s powered by a DaVinci AV DSP processor of Texas Instruments. The processor is a dual core and enables smooth decoding of various codec. You can connect the A3 to an HD TV and enjoy HD-quality video. If that wasn’t enough, this PMP can even record video through a TV Line-In. Supremacy in audio comes to the A3 through iAudio’s JetEffect. Though the standard earphones provided with the player aren’t quite capable, if you connect a good pair of headphones and you will instantly experience it.
The player has a 10 Band Equalizer to create personal settings with Mach3Bass, BBE, 3D Surround and MP Enhance. It’s crazy enough that the A3 records video from an external source, therefore, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear this — the A3 records audio in lossless FLAC format through its Line-In. The other capabilities of the player let it read various image and documents formats. It even covers the RAW format under images, and Microsoft Office files along with the standard PDF and TXT files.
Video Playback
First up, let’s talk about the video playback; it’s the primary reason why anyone would want to own the A3. That said, let me tell you that the COWON A3 has supreme video playback. The Creative Zen Vision W amazed me, while the A3 blew my mind away!
The screen quality of A3 is much better and video playback a lot smoother. As for testing its support for various codec, the A3 did well in our DivX/XviD test, failing in almost none. The only one test that it failed was in the audio playback of a DivX3 Fast. The file’s audio was MP3-encoded, which surprisingly, the player couldn’t decipher. Otherwise, all the other videos with MP3 encoded audio played just fine. Do make sure your video file index is doesn’t have any errors; else fix it with a utility that comes in the fully loaded klite codec pack “AVI Fix”. The A3 know how to play HD content, but it’s restricted to 720p. It finds it difficult to process WMV-HD, whereas, 720p MKV and AVI files played on A3 pretty well. While all standard format videos would start playing in a couple of seconds, the 720p videos would take its toll on the player; although the difference in startup times was just about 4-5 seconds.
As earlier mentioned, this player has the capability to transmit AV to a TV via a cable. There are 2 ways of going about it. If you have a standard TV/LCD or non-HDTV, then there’s the composite cable provided; and if you’re a arrogant owner of an HDTV, then there’s a Hi-Quality cable provided as well. I did try it on a typical TV as well since on a large LCD with 1080p capabilities, but didn’t find much difference between the 2. I feel, it’s not the player which is at fault, but the video quality that was loaded is to live blamed. The large screen we tested this trait was on a 47-inch screen, which was bluntly stretching the video. Going by that, a 32-inch screen would just about be perfect.
The A3 provides lots to fidget around with in order to adjust the video to your liking. All of the adjustments can be done with the video playing in the background — be it aspect ratio, panning & scanning, video playback speed, subtitle adjustments. Hence, the consequence for every change is instant. Even while having the PMP connected to an external screen, you could make the changes on-the-fly plus settle with what looks best on in a matter of few seconds. You can also take a screenshot from a video live and it’ll have the blast saved in the Photos Mode under Screenshots; this is a nice addition something that even Windows Media Player doesn’t offer.