Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Luminous Landscapes just did a review of the Epson P-2000 Picture Viewer and it seems to be a real winner. I’ve been covering the P-2000 since we first started hearing about it a couple months back because it’s been one of those devices that I think has some real promise in appealing to a broader cross-section of users.

Epson’s main business is in printing and imaging, and so it’s pretty predictable that such a device is geared toward the photographic industry – especially now that digital has taken over all but some of the higher end medium and large format ranges as well as the ultra-cheap instamatic and disposable end of the spectrum.

Ever since digital cameras came out, there’s been a continual effort at figuring out storage solutions. Various types of memory cards have served primarily, although Sony in particular has done a lot with more static optical media. But very early on, there were third-party companies (for some reason I never saw a camera company come out with one, although Nikon finally did just last month) selling devices that became known as “digital wallets.” There was an actual product name called “digital wallet” (you can still read a review of it on Steve’s Digicams), but like so many of these companies, they eventually went out of business. Other such companies and products have come and gone, and some had real promise but for whatever reason could not get their product into mainstream consumer electronics retail outlets, and this lack of availability and lack of confidence in the staying power of the company motivated most photographers, amateur and professional alike, to switch to a solution that many of them have at their disposal anyway – a laptop. Certainly laptops are not as portable as these digital wallets are, but you can carry them around to most locations, or at least have them at your hotel room ready to dump image files onto from your memory cards at the end of each day.

So, why I believe that the P-2000 could shake things up here is for a few reasons. One is that Epson is a big, respected name brand. They are not some company that you’ve never heard of that only produces one product. Secondly, it looks like with the P-2000, they’ve gotten everything right. While it could be slightly smaller, the P-2000 has pretty much everything you would want in device for storing images, but more importantly it has capabilities that will appeal to non-photographers. It’s ability to play audio, but more importantly video files, makes it into a true “Portable Media Player” device.

There are a number of companies that are competing in the PMP market, including Archos, VTec, iRiver, Vosonic, Smartdisk, Creative, Nikon, etc. As you can see, most of these are not big names. Also, there seems to be a divide between the brands geared toward Photographers (Nikon, Vosonic, Smartdisk and others) which have the ability to read memory cards directly, and the ones geared more to the general user who wants to listen to music, LOOK at images, and watch video (all the others). It’s not very well known by the general populace that the photo-oriented PMP’s ALSO do a lot of what the non-oriened ones do – they will play many audio and video formats in addition to being a temporary or permanent storage hold for your digital images. It’s unfortunate that these players aren’t being marketed more broadly (I’ve never seen them in a Best Buy or Circuit City for example). Part of the issue may be their relatively larger size than many of the non-photo-oriented PMP’s, but I still think that small amount of additional size is made up for in terms of their utility as a great supplement to the increasingly ubiquitous digital camera. Until most digital camera’s start coming with their own large hard drive’s built in instead of memory cards, the photo-oriented features are only going to increase in value.

The P-2000, it seems, is following many of these other photo-oriented PMP’s in that it is being marketed mainly to photographers and not as a general consumer electronics device. Maybe the quality of the product and the Epson name will finally create a standard bearer in this product category, like the iPod is with MP3 players, but I would have liked it if Epson would have marketed it to everyone, because it really has just as much appeal as any of those other PMP’s, plus the added value to people who take a lot of digital photos. Maybe Epson would rather be the big fish in a little pond, but I for one think they are selling themselves short.

You hear about “convergence” a lot these days, but I think it’s one of those over-hyped concepts which because of that loses some of its meaning. When people talk about convergence, they are talking about creating devices that serve multiple purposes. So far the big ones out there in my mind are smartphones that have the functions of a PDA, a phone, and an internet device, among others, but also PMP’s, which can play music, videos, show pictures, or just serve as portable hard drive. Why does this have an allure? Well, there’s the obvious issue of portability. No one wants to have to carry a whole bag of gadgets with them wherever they go, or for that matter put a device in all your pants and jacket pockets. The other issue is convenience. Why not have your PDA with all your contacts in the same casing as your phone so that you can call anyone or email them without having to go look on your computer or another portable device? Or for that matter take pictures and email them with the same device? Yet another issue but one that’s maybe not discussed as much is price. It really does help when you can fit a bunch of products into one, even it costs $500. If you tried to buy these things separately you could easily go over this price, but companies know that they can only go so high even with this kind of device before people will simply balk because they don’t want to spend such a large chunk of cash on something they will be taking everywhere with them (and consequently will be more at risk for breakage or being stolen). As technology improves, such devices will only start converging more and these individual product categories will go away. You’ll have an all-in-one device, but it may not even need to have a “cell phone” within, but rather a software application that can allow for audible communication over the Internet ala Voice Over IP. Cellular networks of the future will probably merge with wide-area internetworking hotspots that use technologies like Wimax or the even more advanced Mobile-Fi to provide a similar ubiquitous connection as current cellular networks do. We probably won’t see this for at least three or four years, but I’m convinced it will happen in less than ten years. Then, thankfully, we can just deal with one device category and no niche markets per se. You won’t have to go to one type of store to buy a device that has one feature and to another for another. Some will say that having devices dedicated to a single purpose allows for that device to perfect functionality, and I wouldn’t disagree with that. The problem is that this is a tradeoff that most people have decided is worth having if they can save a lot of money and space and have something that meets 98% of their needs and does so with a quality level that for most is perfectly fine. The “snobs” or “philes” or whatever you might call them may still go for the component design that perfects the experience at large financial cost, but as with current audio and video markets, these users will be a small minority.