Two more multimedia players from LC-Power

Follow the big brother, who knows much more than his cheaper companion! Suffice it to look at the back tract of the box, we find plenty of outputs that are new compared to the previous one. It is also important to note that although it is not officially supported by the specification, we have managed the NTFS file system perfectly on two different hard drives. We start with the older and less developed connections, say the composite. We have to say that the image of the device was significantly better even at this residual standard than its cheaper sibling, which is probably due to the more advanced hardware architecture and upscaling to 1080 / 60i during playback, the point being that the Scofields smiled at us smoother and more detailed. This fact was further improved by an ant on the component cable connection, and then the point for i was put by HDMI. Sure, perhaps the most appealing slogan of the machine is HDMI, as this way we can drive the increasingly widespread plasma and LCD TVs in the best possible quality, but we will write about this only at the end of the page.

Let's see the LC-PRO-MPR35-HDMI menu system and setting options:

The style will be familiar from the smaller model, with the use of dark colors combined with simplicity. There is also no problem with this, the player can be used well and easily.

After the logo disappears, you can choose from five options in the main menu:

• Browser
• Video In (video input)
• Time Rec (timer recording)
• File Copy
• Setup

By selecting to browse, you can choose from possible sources such as LOCAL HDD (internal hard disk), USB DEVICE, CARD READER, NETWORK. Selecting the HDD will see a list of partitions and then selecting one to access its contents. The range of features is the same as the smaller model, i.e. while the list is on the left and the file information, thumbnail or mini-video is on the right.

Setting options:

Because of the many options, we don’t want to over-elaborate on the text (as on the previous page), as everything is perfectly visible in the shots. You can also get some background information during playback, as exemplified by the last image. Unfortunately, due to technical limitations, we were not able to try the recording live, but we can read the most important things from the settings. The recording quality can be controlled in five steps (HD, SP, LP, EP, SLP), which can be done on the installed hard disk or on one of the two differentiated USB devices, and with the help of Permanent Timeshift we can shift the time (ie we can rewind or start watch the recording from the beginning while the device continues to record), this is a very fashionable feature these days.

From the point of view of subtitle parameterization, we are not allowed to unlimited here either, in this case only the text encoding can be changed - this is shown in the image on the left above (Text Encoding) - not the size and color. Although we feel a little little about this, we have to admit that the caption handling works perfectly well nonetheless, all the characters are in place, the letters are ideal, easy to read, the position is right.

Finally, a few words about the remote control:

It could also be said a little exaggerated that to find out the capabilities of a particular player, it is enough to look at its remote control. Of course, this is not necessarily the case, but this time we get a lot more buttons on the much larger interface, which means more functions and options. At first glance, the effect is more serious, the individual areas are logically structured, and they differ in shape and color. The two AAA batteries required for operation are part of the package in the same way as for the previous model.

After we finished the skinning in our editorial office, we took the bigger machine to the environment of a 50″ full HD plasma to find out the relevant capabilities. (We would like to note here that the two devices immediately acknowledged the presence of the other, i.e. we had no problems with connection and commissioning.) On the manufacturer's website, we can find this: "Full HD 1080i Support (1920 x 1080 Pixel)". Of course, this is immediately suspicious, since the full HD standard means 1080p, so there is something wrong here. Unfortunately, we felt good about it: in practice, we are only able to forward the 1080 line from the MPR35-HDMI in very exceptional cases (but we could even say that never).

The other problem is that, unfortunately, the device does not recognize the MKV container by default, which means that 90% of HD video content is inaccessible to it from the start. Perhaps the second most common format is HD WMV, but we couldn't even play Windows Media Video with "traditional" resolution (it's true, we didn't try all the existing files that came our way). However, we had a nature film encoded in MPEG-4 in 720p AVI format, which was beautifully handled by the MPR35-HDMI. We were rewarded with smooth playback and virtually flawless image quality. However, I am glad that there are not many films in this format around the world.