Epson P-3000 photo viewer and media player

The big news is the PMP-first use of a four-colour filter system creating 16.7m colours, which means the P-3000's 640 x 480 screen can display images encoded in Adobe RGB colour space by splitting ordinary green into emerald green and yellow green alongside the conventional red and blue (RGB). This not only increases detail levels but also widens the entire colour gamut making shots more realistic and natural.

Epson's P-3000: a 16m-colour screen, perfect for pics and videos

Certainly the images provided on the P-3000 were extremely impressive, but our own sun-splashed beach shots taken on a Samsung NV10 digicam looked as good as we've ever seen them on a portable digital display. And if you're still in any doubt as to the screen's quality, the P-3000 offers a 400 per cent zoom feature that holds up almost unbelievably well.

Uploading shots is as simple as ABC thanks to the USB connectivity and those bountiful memory card slots that cater to SDHC, MMC, CompactFlash and Micro Drive. It would have been nice to see xD and Memory Stick support.

Viewing photo files is a simple affair broken down into three modes: 12 or 64 thumbnails, or an extended list. You can whizz through the thumbnail files at a rate of knots so finding specific images is quick and easy, though we found that scrolling through fullscreen images - especially those big Raw files - caused a real lag that soon became frustrating.

Video playback is another area that benefits hugely from that capable new screen. Epson has built in support for MPEG 1,2 and 4 as well as AVC, WMV 9, Motion JPEG and DivX for compressed files - no XviD though. Moving images were rendered equally as well as stills, with little to no motion blur or jitter evident and contrast levels strong enough to keep blacks black.

Epson's P-3000: strong image format support

The P-3000 is also the first portable product to support xvYCC video colour space, an extended colour space for video application that makes colours punchier and more potent. A video-out port is included for hooking up a TV.