Coby V-Zon Portable Media Player
Coby V-Zon Portable Media Player review: PORTABLE PLAYER ALTERNATIVE
June 2007 By Grant ClauserCoby’s recent MP3 and video players have had a fashion upgrade of sorts—this model sports a glossy black front reminiscent of a Sony PSP with a white back panel. There are only three buttons on the front plus a four-way joystick that also functions as an enter button. On the side, under a little rubber cover, is the USB jack plus an A/V input and output jack.
Media compatibility is also one of the Coby’s strong points. On the music side it supports only MP3 and WMA, but for video it will digest MP4, AVI, ASF, XviD, and Windows Media 9 (WMV and ASF). In the picture department you get JPEG, GIF and BMP.
Getting files onto the Coby is easy, but some people would appreciate a little more organization and hand-holding. Simply connect it to a USB port on a Windows or Mac machine, and drag and drop your media files into the appropriate folder (music, photo, video, ebook). If you want to make customized play lists or organize the music or videos by genre, you’ll have to create your own subfolders on the system. You can do this either with your PC when the V-Zon is connected or you can create folders on the fly with the unit.
Navigating around your files on the Z-Von isn’t complicated once you get accustomed to the system. The main menu displays icons for all the media categories plus system controls. Select one and you’re presented with folders containing your content. If you named and organized everything first, finding what you want isn’t difficult. If you didn’t then you’ll just get a long list of file names. When navigating your music collection you can’t opt to search by artist, track or genre the way other players allow. Instead, you just browse the album folders the way you would in a Windows Explorer window. It’s not that it’s difficult, but it doesn’t give you that thrill of coolness that comes with a Zune or iPod.
Getting music and pictures onto the unit with a PC is one thing, but video is altogether a different animal. I don’t know about you, but I’m not big into downloading video. I already pay enough for DVDs, TV service and a DVR. The Coby does a trick that the iPod, Zune and Sansa can’t––it can record video directly from a DVD player or TV set-top-box. In my opinion, this is the best feature of the PMP4320. I plugged the supplied composite/stereo cables into my TV set-top-box and recorded a few hours worth of on-demand movies. The player doesn’t let you schedule by time, but you can set it to shut off at set durations, up to 2 hours. The videos appear in a special folder within the video menu.
My recorded videos looked pretty good. Not as good as some of the movies or TV content available on iTunes, but good enough for watching during my train commute, and they didn’t cost me any extra. The video controls could be a little easier to use. The fast forward was a bit sensitive and the resume feature didn’t work a couple of times, forcing me to use the fast forward to get back to the spot I left off when I shut the unit down. I got about 4 hours of video playback on the battery.
Coby’s 4320 player is not as smooth as some of its competitors. Its functions may take some getting used to, and the 20 GB hard drive doesn’t seem impressive compared to the 30 GBs of the Zune or the 60 GBs of the biggest iPod (a 40GB with a 7-inch screen is also available). But it’s got a larger screen, built-in video recording, expandable memory in the form of an SD card slot, a mic for voice recording and an FM tuner (that is recordable).
