Epson's new photo viewers

Epson announced two new photo viewers today, the P-3000 and the P-5000, as follow-ups to the company's current P-2000 and P-4000. In an attempt to increase the color gamut of the viewers' 4-inch, 640x480-pixel LCD screens, Epson has added a fourth color to the usual RGB LCD screen color-filter system. The new screen, which Epson calls Photo Fine Ultra, includes two colors of green, emerald-green and yellow-green, which is enough to let the display create more than 16.7 million colors, says Epson. The company also asserts that its Photo Fine Ultra display can reproduce 88 percent of the Adobe RGB color gamut and includes support for that color space, along with sRGB in the viewers. Also included is support for RAW and JPEG images; MPEG-4, Motion JPEG, and DivX video files; as well as MP3 and AAC audio files. A pair of memory card slots lets you back up images from CompactFlash or SD cards, and with an adapter, most other card types. Plus, according to Epson, a new processor speeds up image downloads by up to 250 percent.

The only difference between the two models is the size of their hard drives. The P-3000 includes a 40GB drive, while the P-5000 doubles that to 80GB. Previous Epson photo viewers in this family have been much better suited to viewing images or video than to listening to music. However, Epson has updated the interface in hopes of creating a more universal entertainment experience and now includes the company's Link2 software to automate file conversion and playlist creation and management. As with past P-series viewers, all of this comes at a steep price. The P-3000 and the P-5000 have already begun shipping to stores, where they will be available at prices of $499 and $699, respectively.