Roku HD1000 High-Definition Digital Media Player : Reviews, Cheap, Discount Tv Television

Average Rating: 4.00 out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Hi-Res HDTV pictures, MP3s, easy-to-use, and inexpensive.
High-Resolution HDTV output looks fantastic, for both pictures and
menus. MP3 player displays ID3 tags and can play in the background
while you do other things (like watch a slideshow). The user
interface is clean, minimalist, and easy to use. It finds shared
content on networked drives and inserted flash cards and they appear
in the user interface automatically. Unlike the competition, it
requires no proprietary server software: just plug it in and you are
ready to go. And it costs about the same as competing products, but
none of them provide HDTV output.

The only drawback is that the remote responsiveness is slightly worse
than other electronics, though programming a learning remote from the
supplied remote makes it better.

Rating:

- Second thoughts
This product is truly designed for owners of digital cameras with various types of memory cards. The image quality on large format HD screens is quite impressive.

Downside, you have to have a compact flash card and reader in order to import the updated software. Looking at prices at Amazon this could cost more than half the price of the unit itself. This is a serious shortcoming for this product and my reason for a average rating. I have still not been able to get the unit to work on either of my networks using Windows XP.

Most people keep their photo's on CD's and a CD slot would have been a great feature, even over the assortment of memory card slots they provide. I would believe that most images are moved from memory cards to hard drives and cd's for long term storage and later viewing making a CD drive much more practical.

Rating:

- Very good product, although a bit too expensive
This is a very well executed product.

After using the Prismiq MediaPlayer for six months (which I have now sold off on ebay), this is a godsend. Even my wife can now use the Roku HD1000.

* Component Video Output of upto 1080i (this is a plus for me as I have an HDTV, although this may not be an important feature to you if you do not have HDTV) -- finally some justice done to my digital photos. Actually, the UI is more readable as well because of the higher resolution.

* Very good UI, although some some features (better playlist navigation, auto-playlists or sort by artist/album/genre etc) are desperately needed.

* Open platform, SDK is freely available. Opens door for 3rd-party developers

* No special server software needed, other than SMB file sharing.

* The company engineers (including the CEO) seems to be listening to the customers and coming up with useful feature updates.

* The only negative feature is its price. At $500, it seems a bit too expensive.