Hands-on review: the NHJ MPM-202 personal media player
by Barb Dybwad


We had a chance to spend some time with the NHJ MPM-202 portable media player. It’s a 60GB PMP that doubles the capacity of its predecessor, the MPM-201, and shares most of its features. Overall we found the device incredibly easy to use and great value for the price, particularly as compared to its competitors. Read on for the full review.

First impressions

The unit is solid. It may lack a certain sex appeal, but there is nothing flimsy or cheap about the feel of the device in your hand. The design is straightforward and intuitive: volume control scrollwheel plus play and stop buttons on the right, 4-way selector plus menu and back buttons on the left. The positioning of the controls on either side of the screen makes it easy to hold the device in both hands and control it with the thumbs. There is nothing awkward about the way the controls work — the interface is easy to use and each command does exactly what you’d expect it to do. The only disappointing aspect of the interface is the virtual keyboard entry system, which fares slightly better than the keyboard input of the PSP as you don’t have to be T9-ing the thing, but it’s still just one of those inconvenient scroll-to-key-press-enter, repeat x15 and twelve hours later, your movie is renamed. But it’s not like there are many non-keyboard-bearing devices that really make this easy.

The included A/V dock is nice — it’s sturdy, and it comes with separate cables whereas its main competitor, the Archos AV420, comes with a dock that has integrated cables that looks akin to an unwieldy octopus. The MPM-202 comes with a “record” button built into the dock, and it would be hard to imagine simplifying the process of recording new content any further than cuing up a source and pressing record. It was refreshingly dead easy.

Some other things we noticed right off the bat: there’s a cute little kick-stand built right into the back of the unit. It means you can prop the device up on a desk to watch it, which is more handy than you realize.

The internal stereo speakers have a lot of horsepower for a portable unit. You can get some decent volume out of them with very little distortion until you’re all the way at the highest setting. For listening to music, they’re a bit too treble-heavy to make anyone really happy, but for watching movies they’re nice because you can get away with not being tethered to headphones or external speakers. It’s also handy to have slots for both CF and SD media.
Features

The NHJ MPM-202 is the beefier sibling of the MPM-201 — they share the same featureset, but the MPM-202 has 60GB worth of storage to the MPM-201’s 30GB. It’s got a 3.5-inch screen, CF type II and SD memory slots, internal stereo speakers, TV-tuner in the dock, internal microphone (records in WAV), AV-output, image display (JPG), and of course, and and video recording and playback. The unit ships with a cradle and IR remote, mini to RCA cable, USB cable, S-video cable, AC adapter, carrying pouch, headphones, manual, and CD-ROM with Music Match and Dr. Divx video conversion software. As distributed by TightSystems in the U.S. (which, although currently in litigation with Macromedia, still offers the MPM-202 through the separately owned and operated DVG Store retail outlet accessible via the TightSystems website), the unit is now shipping for $449 which includes a free extra battery and free shipping.

Transferring content

The NHJ MPM-202 connects to Windows or Mac machines via USB 2.0, and shows up as a Mass Storage Device, which means it just looks like an external hard drive connected to your machine. Unless you’re running Windows 98 or Mac OS 8 (yikes!), you shouldn’t have to install the drivers that come on the installation CD-ROM. From there, you just drag and drop the files into their appropriate locations in the file structure of the unit’s hard drive — or vice versa, if you’ve recorded something you want to copy to your computer.

You can also transfer files from storage media to the MPM’s internal hard drive. This is pretty handy for photographers, who’ll be able to use this unit as portable storage. Setting up the transfer is fairly straightforward in the File Manager. Just select a folder of images, select copy, then choose the appropriate destination.

Recording content
Movies

Pop the unit in the dock, hook up your source, and select “TV mode” from the main menu. You can choose one of three quality levels: QVGA, VGA, and VGA Fine. For playback just on the unit itself, QVGA does the job admirably. For something that will be watched primarily on a TV, you’ll want to go with at least VGA and VGA Fine if you have enough space. Scroll up to “Video in” and select where your video source is coming from: the TV tuner, component in or S-video in.

MPM-202 video in

You should then see your source show up on the MPM’s screen — from here, just press the record button the dock to get going. If you’re recording a bunch of things at once you can then dispense with all the setup steps and just hit the record button to start, stop button to stop. If you’re recording a source for more than an hour, the MPM will automagically split your recording into multiple files; when you play them back, they’ll be stitched together so you won’t notice the separation (other than a tiny flicker at the moment of changeover).

Recording from the TV tuner is really no different. You just select “TV in” as your source and start recording the same way, by pressing the big red record button. There’s a scheduling function so you can schedule recordings, and have them repeat weekly or monthly if desired. It’s no substitute for a full-featured DVR, but it gets the job done if you just want to record some shows to take with you on a trip or outing.

Voice recorder

The voice recording function is as easy to use as the rest of the player’s functions, but this is the area where the quality is not as great. Recording via the internal mic results in a file with audible hiss. You can understand what’s being said without a problem, but you wouldn’t want to use it for anything mission critical. It’s fine for recording personal memos, but breaks down pretty quickly the farther you get from the audio source — so wouldn’t be terribly useful for doing things like recording lectures, e.g. This is probably why they label this “My Voice” in the menu! That’s about all it’s good for.


Playing back content
Movies

To view a file on the player, just select “My Movies” from the main menu and drill down into the file system to wherever your video lives, be it on the internal drive or on external media (DivX-encoded AVI files, only). Hit OK to start playback. Hit the arrow keys to fast forward or reverse at 2x, 4x or 8x speeds. You’ll scrub through the video as you go, so you can see where you are and where you want to stop; just hit play to resume normal playback. Hit stop to stop. Hit back to go out to the most immediate file system subfolder, or Menu to go all the way back out to the main menu. It’s all very simple and works exactly as you would expect.

MPM-202 movie playback

The only drawback to the interface here is there’s no “bookmark” feature, so if you’re in the middle of a movie and need to stop watching, you can’t easily return to where you left off. You’ll just have to fast forward to get back to where you were.

Some of the early reviews on this unit dissed on the screen quality of this player. It may be slightly smaller than the screen on the Archos AV420, e.g., but in terms of quality we found them pretty comparable. If you look very closely you can pick out the individual dots in the display — and that’s about it. Nobody will watch this unit from 2 inches away, so we can’t see that it really matters. We didn’t have any issues with it.

Playing back to an external TV does show off the pixelation of your video content more than it will on the MPM-202’s screen. The quality you’re going to get is going to depend on the resolution and bit rate of the original file, obviously. Viewing almost anything on the smaller screen tends to gloss over differences in quality much more than viewing the same files on the big screen. Still, you have the extra space to store videos encoded at higher resolutions/bit rates, so you can take advantage of that if you’re going to be doing a lot of AV out to an external television.

As far as battery life goes, for pure video playback we got a fairly consistent three and half hours of battery life, tested over six trials with both batteries. Since you get a free extra battery with the unit, that’s about seven hours playback without a recharge out of the box, which’ll come close to tiding you over on your next trans-Atlantic, you jetsetters, you. We didn’t do a test for pure audio playback alone, but expect quite a bit more playback time from a single charge.

Music

The music playing interface is as dead easy to use as everything else, but it’s a bit on the no frills side. The biggest downer here is there’s no support for custom playlists, so if you want a particular mix of tunes you’ll have to physically organize them first and move them onto the player. The other bummer is that the display skimps out on the file metadata/ID tags, which seems sort of odd — the photo viewer application lets you see all kinds of crazy metadata on photos that most will probably never even care to look at, but all the info you can see about a music track is the artist and track name (and that, sporadically, which we never quite figured out)? Seems weird. Even if you happen to have all of your artist and track name info included in your filenames, the interface doesn’t wrap the text, so you can only see the first 15 characters displayed. This also means no album art, of course, which isn’t as big of a deal, but why not take advantage of having that screen?

MPM-202 music playback

What the interface does show is your usual transport functions: play/pause, forward/reverse and stop, and current playhead location, as well as volume and controls buttons for shuffle and repeat. Hit the OK button to call up a very simple EQ interface, which basically gives you +3/-3 “units” in either direction for bass and treble. Pretty basic.

The sound quality is pretty decent. We didn’t have any complaints when listening through computer speakers, headphones, a decent stereo, or in the car. We never found the volume lacking, nor did anything sound hideously unbalanced at flat EQ. Whereas the internal speakers do a decent job for listening to speech and movie dialogue, for listening to music you’ll definitely want to hook up some headphones or to an external speaker of some sort. For podcasts, though, the internal speakers are not too shabby — you can get away with it in a pinch if you don’t want to be tethered to the headphones while listening.

No troubles here. As long as you organize your files the way you want them before transferring to the player, you can go slideshow nuts to your heart’s content. When viewing an image, just hit the “Play” button to bring up a selection of how much delay you’d like between slides (3, 5, 10, 30, and 60 seconds) and hit OK — it will keep playing continuously, with transitions, until you tell it to stop. You can view details on a photo by pressing the OK button in non-slideshow mode, or rotate it with the volume control (and save the orientation, if desired).

Overall

This is a nicely-featured PMP, easy to use, and great value for 60GB of storage. The one-touch recording option on the dock is about as easy as it gets. If you’re looking for a portable media player that is intuitive to operate, reliable, and well worth the ticket price, we have no qualms recommending the NHJ MPM-202.
Good and bad
Good things:

* Uses standard A/V cables that can be repurposed generally as needed, as opposed to the octopus of locked down cables that comes with the Archos A/V dock.
* One-button recording.
* Solid construction; durable casing.
* Compact Flash and SD slots.
* Little foot for propping the thing up on a desk/table - really handy!
* External stereo speakers, for a portable unit, are pretty good.
* Interface: dead easy to figure out and use.
* Has an AV-out port right on the unit itself, so you can throw video out to a TV without needing the cradle.
* 60GB of storage at a great price — lots of value in this unit.

Bad things:

* File renaming interface is awkward and time-consuming.
* Music player has only rudimentary support for metadata.
* No music playlist support.
* Voice recording quality is so-so. Good for notes to self and recording in a pinch, but is not production-quality audio recording.

It is funny how u see the same old reviews that are identical in wording but miraculously by different authors.....how is that exactly??......seems like cutting and pasting and taking credit for someone else's work.

As far as I know this review was written by Barb Dybwad and credit is given right under the title.