Archos AV4100 review

What you need to know

Reviewed by: Guy Cocker

Reviewed on: 3 June 2005

Tags: Archos Technology, Archos AV4100, user interface, DVD player, resolution

We like:

Solid design; massive hard drive; easy navigation; great AV performance

We don't like:

Awful sound quality from the speaker; some video formats missing; crashes easily; video output is composite-only, so looks poor on TV

You might also need:

Collection of digitised movies and music

CNET UK judgement:

Archos' AV4100 is a portable media centre with a huge 100GB capacity that offers peerless video quality and a clean, functional design. However, it's expensive and still doesn't offer across-the-board format support, most noticeably omitting MPEG and QuickTime. But if this isn't important, it manages to tick all the important boxes, including external source recording, and it fully supports the omnipresent DivX and Xvid codecs for highly impressive results

Full review:

An entire DVD collection in your pocket. It's a grand claim, but one that the Archos AV4100 personal video player can justifiably boast. An average DivX movie takes up roughly 700MB, so this 100GB Archos has enough storage for over 120 movies. In practise, the encoding process for so many movies would take months, but it's certainly the biggest portable storage device we've had in the office. Continue Reading...