Home > Consumer Reviews > COWON A3-30SL 30GB Portable Media Player (Silver)

i have always been a fan of cowon products, this just gives me reason to love them even more. this player is versatile it plays thru s-vid outputs and rca outputs. drag and drop files and arrange them how YOU want with no dumb programs like I-pod or zune. the eq gives you very nice control of the sound. it may only be 30 gig but i didn't need a lot of storage. the video is crisp and clear and even the little speakers inside sound pretty good for their size. the only drawback to it is it is a little larger than most PMP's on the market and i get teased it looks like a GPS but it's because of the inputs outputs and speakers. well i could go on, and on but you get the message. if you want simple, easy to use media player, this and others like it are your best bet.

I was looking for a video device, mostly for use while traveling, and have been very happy with the A3. I do not use the device much for the other functions offered (MP3, pics, radio, etc.)

I primarily watch DivX videos and the player holds 40 full-length movies quite comfortably. The video quality and resolution I found to be excellent with the minor distraction of some screen glare. Audio quality is also very good, although the unit could use a bit more volume for use on airplanes.

Controls were easy to understand and the interface is reasonably intuitive (my 5 year old can work it). I didn't read the manual but didn't have trouble figuring out how to do anything. The unit itself is very solidly built and holds up well to travel and children. It is somewhat heavier than I anticipated for the size.

For me the greatest selling point is the very universal USB interface. This unit requires no proprietary software to load and manage files. So whether you're on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. you just plug and go. It shows up just like another drive. I use multiple computers at home & work plus others computers on the road so I don't want to be hassled with having to install software. So far the A3 talks to everything I plug it into.

I would buy it again without hesitation.

The A3 is better than the A2 a little bit. A3 better Screen and Sharper Picture But Not as Bright. Sound the Same as A2 , Video Recording better But Will Not Record DVDs Direct Like A2 it Records Everthing DVD,Bluerays,HDdvds Everthing. Had my A2 for over 2.5 Years No Problem. Great Product With Limits.

Got mine delivered by Amazon yesterday. Since people already know the good stuff about it, I won't harp on same string. A couple of bad things I noticed are--

1) At times, it's difficult to have the joystick register what you really wanted it to do, ie, it works as if you'd pushed it toward the left when all you really wanted was a center click--will surely take some time to get used to this erratic control mechanism--and this is something that can't be fixed with firmware upgrade.
2) Had audio-video sync issue with one of the video files when I played it the first time--the next time I played it, they were in perfect synchronization.
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I got this player for long plane trips after much research. I was torn between this and the Archos 605. I went with this one because it supported lots of formats. I ended up returning it, and am waiting for something better to come out.

Here are the problems I had with it, in decreasing order of importance:
1. It says it supports lots of doc formats like word, excel, and pdf. In actuality, the only formats it natively supports is text and csd. it provides software (windows only) to transcode to csd. The kicker is that apparently the software requires that you have installed the program controlling the format to transfer from. E.g., to convert an excel doc, you need to have microsoft excel installed. Ugh. I feel deceived. Further, I wasn't impressed with the csd viewing capabilities.

2. Frustrated, I converted some files to text and tried them out. The player has some bugs where it only display portions of the text file! Somehow they managed to mess up the text viewer on the player so it only displays a small prefix of the text file.

3. On video files I was watching, it has a bug in which the audio is 5 seconds behind the video - wow did that give me a headache.

4. The radio reception on the device sucks, and the auto-record does not support once-a-week recording.

5. The video player has a bug where if you fastforward twice in succession, the player locks up.

6. It was clunky to forward and rewind thru video. You have to go thru a bunch of menus to specify how much to forward and rewind, and it doesn't display images during forward/rewind so it's hard to tell if you've skipped over the spot you wanted to fastforward to.

7. On the plane, with a pair of Sennheiser HD-280 headphones, I found myself wishing the volume control would go louder.

On the plus side, it was easy to connect to Mac and Linux boxes. It just appears as a USB drive, which was nice.

I don't like the Archos player because of the nickle-and-diming of extra features and limited format support. so I think I'm just going to sit out of the market until something more compelling comes along.