October 2006 | Margaret Brown
An easy way to store and display digital photos in your living room.
It's a great concept in theory: take an 80 GB hard disk drive (HDD) and stick it into a box with memory card slots and USB and A/V connections and sell it as a 'Digital Photo Album'. In a nutshell, that's the Sony HDPS-L1. Looking a lot like a small DVD player, with standard and component TV connections, the HDPS-L fits neatly into any home entertainment set-up. Too bad its versatility has been limited by software that is clearly targeted at everyday consumers.
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It's a great concept in theory: take an 80GB hard disk drive (HDD) and stick it into a box with memory card slots and USB and A/V connections and sell it as a 'Digital Photo Album'. In a nutshell, that's the Sony HDPS-L1. Looking a lot like a small DVD player, with standard and component TV connections, the HDPS-L fits neatly into any home entertainment set-up. Too bad its versatility has been limited by software that is clearly targeted at everyday consumers.
Most of these limitations apply to what the HDPS-L1 can't do, so we'll start be outlining what it can do reasonably well. As a display device, it's simple to set up and reasonably easy to operate via the supplied remote control. However, you can't view images directly from a memory card; instead you have to copy them to the HDD first. And when you do, the HDPS-L1 automatically creates a new folder for each set of pictures. On the plus side, it names each folder according to the most recent shooting date, adding an extension for multiple folders created on the same day. This works well for occasional snapshooters; less so for frequent photographers because there's no easy way to move images from one folder to another.
You can register selected images individually or collectively into groups to make searching for individual shots easier and enable slideshows of images from different folders to be played. And individual shots can be deleted from groups relatively easily. When you want to view a group of images, selecting Group in the Home menu lets you find it moderately quickly by displaying the first few images in the set. You can also sort images by shooting date, using the Folder menu, and back-up important folders by duplicating them (although this won't help if the HDD crashes).
Selecting Calendar in the Home menu displays a calendar page for the current month with indicators marking days on which pictures were downloaded. It's easy to view images in these folders by selecting them via the arrow pad. The Calendar function can also be used to find images taken on a specific date in the Folder menu.
Little use is made of image metadata, which is a pity as the HDPS-L1's versatility could have been expanded dramatically. However, images tagged for automatic rotation will be rotated on-screen. But they may also be cropped, which can compromise the compositions of your shots, especially with a widescreen TV set. Cropping appears to be arbitrary in playback mode, yielding results that may be interesting - or disappointing. Random zooming is also common in slideshow playback, again with varying degrees of acceptability. You can elect to zoom in or out via the remote control - and also rotate non-tagged images. In slideshow playback, non-tagged vertical images aren't rotated so you have to move the images into Group folders, rotating them as you do so.
A USB cable is provided for connecting the HDPS-L1 to a computer, where it can act as an external drive and allows images to be copied from the HDPS-L1 to the PC. But if you want to view images from your computer, you must first convert them to the appropriate format by copying them to the HDPS-L1's HDD. JPEGs are the only image format supported for users of non-Sony cameras but thumbnails of Sony's SRF and SRF2 Raw files can be displayed.
The USB cable is also required for uploading WAV music files to the unit for use as background music, because you will quickly tire of the pre-loaded tunes. The transition effects are sufficiently varied and conservative to be useful, though.
On the whole, Sony's HDPS-L1 may satisfy family snapshooters because it's nice to be able to view your pictures on your lounge room TV with everybody gathered round. The unit itself is smart but unobtrusive and very easy to connect and operate, which should satisfy these consumers. But its limitations prevent it from being the ideal storage option for serious photographers, especially as you can get an external HDD with more than double the capacity for less than half the price of the Sony HDPS-L1. With computer technology creeping steadily into the home entertainment environment, this could be a more versatile option in the future.
Storage capacity: 80 GB (75 GB usable)
Card slots: MS, SD/MMC, xD-Picture Card, CF/Microdrive
Interface: USB 2.0 (Hi-Speed/Full-Speed)
Connectors: USB (mini-B), Audio In, AV Out, Component video
Supported file formats: JPEG, RAW (SRF, SRF2 only); WAV
Dimensions: 215 x 35 x 255 mm
Weight: 1.8 kg