Cowon A3 review

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8.0

excellent

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Cowon A3 user reviews

February 25, 2008

Posted by: nopreceja

"Not that good, really"

What I like:

10 band equalizer

What I don't like:

-all videos and photos are little cropped and zoom while viewed and due to are blurred

Review:

Due to bug in A3 are all images and all videos which has exact the same resolution as display viewed distorded and blurred. It is viewed cropped by 1 pixel from top, 2 pixels from left, 3 pixels from right and by 3 pixels from bottom and then zoomed to fullscreen. As a result is picture blurred and has colour artifacts (these artifacts are between colour pixels and black colour pixels).

Try to view this video
[URL]http://www.jakubsloup.cz/originalvideo.mp4[/URL]

or this picture on A3:

[U][IMG]http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/2994/originalpicturexh8.png[/IMG][/U]

You will see this on A3 screen:
[IMG]http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/1713/viewedpicturehd1.png[/IMG]

(How i get this picture? I saved original picture as a video (h264 codec) and then i played it at Cowon A3. While playing i went to menu and took screenshot (by Screenshot feature). Final screenshot surprisingly exacly represent what is viewed on A3 screen - blurred, cropped and distorded picture)

Graphical artifact are the same for videos and for photos. Surprisingly is original picture viewed correctly if you set it as wallpaper !

I tested it in firmware versions 1.18beta and 1.15, in both firmwares is the same problem.

I think that main reason why it wasn`t revealed before is due to A3`s extreme display resolution 800x480 (while display size is equal to credit card), but with this bug it looks like that display resolution is approximately 300x180.

Please Cowon fix it, because this degrading A3 display quality. At least fix that cropping - i think that cropping is the main reason which causing that picture looks ugly.