Worth Reading?
Yikes, in their hurry to claim the title of “first 100gb mp3 player!” DMC obviously forgot to design an attractive casing for their headline-grabbing DAP. Still, if you’re in the market for a way to enjoy 3,500 hours of music (stored as 64kb/s WMA files), then I guess this has to figure highly on your options list.
Problem is, one of the big benefits of high-capacity portable media players is their effortless accommodation of video files - whether downloaded or ripped from TV or DVD - and there the DMC Xclef 500 falls flat. That monochrome screen is a real let-down, when even cheap iPod knock-offs are boasting super-vibrant OLED displays.
The Xclef 500 comes in five varieties: no drive (US $149), 40GB (US $249), 60 GB (US $299), 80 GB (US $349) and 100 GB (US $449). Battery life is quite a bit short of 3,500 hours, however, at just 20, and given that it shows up simply as an external drive rather than having music organisation software you’ll have to be pretty dedicated to maintain some sort of usable file structure for all those files.
DMC are indicating their next model will have 132GB; hopefully they also rethink that shoddy screen.
This is ancient news! This product has been out for well over 18 months! The screen wasn’t being compared to Video iPod videos when the Xclef launched since there were no such things as “Video iPods” then!