Image Courtesy: iRiver

Have you noticed how the recent line of MP3 players from numerous companies has started doing photo slideshows and even video playback? The upcoming thing in consumer electronics, especially devices of such dimensions, is a multimedia player that would not only play audio files, but also video files along with photo slideshows – all with a much brighter and bigger screen. For our preliminary look today, we have iRiver’s PMP-140 multimedia player that promises quite a bit.

IRiver’s PMP-140 pretty much does everything you would it to do. It plays digital music and video files with 40GB of storage capacity to store about 160 hours of video and up to 1,200 hours of music, according to iRiver. The PMP-140 also has a vivid and sharp LCD screen that measures 3.5" with 260K colors. Furthermore, you also get the built-in FM tuner functionality along with an integrated voice recorder, built-in speakers and USB 2.0 compliance for faster and reliable transfer speeds.

According to iRiver, the PMP-140 is equipped with a Li-Ion rechargeable battery that can be charged via an independent power adapter. The company claims the battery lifespan to be around 10 hours for audio and 5 hours for video, which aren’t too impressive if you compare that to what some of the other players are offering, at least with music playback.

Uniquely, the PMP-140 also has TV Out support for NTSC/PAL. It has support for five preset equalizer options, one user equalizer option and voice recording capability. You also get Line In/Out options as well. One of the favorable points for the PMP-140 is the support for various formats including MPEG 1, 2, 2.5 Layer3, WMA, WAV, ASF, JPG and BMP. The best possible frame rates for video are 30FPS, which is about what the standard TV cameras record at (24FPS) for TV shows, so there’s no loss in quality with the PMP-140.

The PMP line of multimedia players comes in two storage options: 40GB and 20GB. The 20GB version currently retails for $449.99 while the 40GB retails for $549.99.