Rated 
AV 700 Video Player recorder
Large Screen size, Amazing disk size
Poor synchronization software included, clumsy controls, screen quality, poor video playback life.
Posted Feb 26, 2007 - This is my third mp3/mp4 player that I have owned - and its by far the best. But even with how happy I am with the AV700 - I can also clearly see things I wish were were better about it. The screen size really is what separates this player from the other mp4 players on the market. It is thoroughly enjoyable and watching is something comfortable for more than one person at a time. Archos actually sells a mounting kit so that the device attached to the headrest of one of the front seats in the car so that your kids can watch movies while you drive. Although the screen is wonderful - at the same time the quality of the screen is not as sharp as some of the other high end mp4 player screens - but this is nitpicking a bit. The player has great sound quality with the included headphones. The external speakers are also nice and loud compared to the other mp4 players I have used. One thing that is annoying is that while you can easily adjust the volume using the built in head phones - adjusting the volume on the built in speakers while watching a movie is not possible - you need to go to a hard to get to configuration screen to adjust the external speaker volume. I am not much of a music enthusiast, but playing mp3 files seemed to work nicely. One of the reasons I bought the av700 is because I planned on recording video content from my TV/VCR/DVD onto the av700. And while it doesn't seem all that complicated from the instructions - I still have not attempted to do that yet - making me wonder if this is such a great feature after all. The big thing is getting movies onto the player. I use media player 10 to sychronize movies onto the player. Most mp4 players require you to use media player to sync with your device and put files onto it. My last mp4 player required me to convert almost every file before it was synchronized. Given that convertion of files takes a long time - it can be a real pain. The AV700 seems to be able to sync lots of different kinds of files without convertion. The problem is sometimes the sync process in media player sometimes puts files onto the AV700 without syncing them - when in fact the AV700 cant play those files without conversion. I found this to be a bit annoying - although the one redeaming aspect of this is that the problem seems to happen more with older AVI files and rarely with newer ones. The conversion tool that comes with the AV700 is not so great. When I have a video that needs conversion - I wind up using a third party AVI conversion softer to convert those videos to something the AV700 can use. One other thing to note - the brochures for the AV700 says it plays games - but mine came with a few games that were really crummy. Don't buy this thing for the games... Battery life for the device is just over 4 hours for video player - which is not bad - but its shorter than most other devices. Overall, I am very happy with the AV700. I have a great device that more than one person can comfortably watch and enough disk space to keep tons of stuff on it.
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