Continued...

If you think everything we have talked about was boring and uninteresting, well, aren't you in for a surprise? Again, if you are ready to shell $99 for another add-on, this could be well worth it. You can purchase a DVR Station for Archos' 405, and record movies and TV shows directly from your DVR recorder. You can also playback existing files on your TV with the added dock. However, $99 is a hefty price to pay on top of $149.99 for the base + whatever plug-ins you are interested in purchasing. Once you have the dock installed, there's a standard navigation guide that will let you browse the media player and interact with it. A remote control and a QWERTY keyboard are included for effortless navigation and were a pleasure to work with.

Creative Zen MP3 Player

Audio and video performance was excellent in our tests. As we stated earlier, video and images were crisp and vibrant on a matte display. And there's no difference between audio and video quality. They are both topnotch, a miracle for a dedicated portable video player (PVP). According to Archos, the battery life can last approximately 5x hours for video and 16x hours for audio. It met those times comfortably in our performance lab. Despite that, however, these aren't the best times we have seen with other PVP's, but we can let it slide for now. Of course, equalizer options and other customizations are present for you to tinker with, if that's your thing. With that said, we are absolutely appalled at the 2GB onboard memory capacity. Is Archos serious about this? How could you possibly sell such a loaded device, but skimp on integrated storage? Wow, just wow! Thanks to Archos, you should now budget the price of SD cards for expandable storage in the final price.

Needless to say, the $149.99 price tag is the bare minimum you can expect to pay, but if you are remotely serious about fully utilizing 405's capabilities, be ready to add at least another $100 to the overall price to make it a truly worthwhile device. Don't get us wrong, it's an excellent unit, but Archos' idea of piecemeal deals is a tad unfriendly.

Click here to checkout the latest pricing Archos 405 media player!