Digital Trends

Cowon Q5W

January 28th, 2008 | by Mike Kobrin

Movies and Music

Our test movies, The Bourne Ultimatum and Four Rooms, looked excellent on the built-in LCD. When we used the included AV cables (we chose the component option, though you can also do composite, S-Video, and SPDIF) with our 40-inch Samsung HDTV, the picture was very clear with well-synced audio.

The included earbuds are nothing special, but when we plugged in our Etymotic ER4P headphones, we found the sound quality very pleasing. As is typical of Cowon's players, you can fiddle endlessly with sound enhancement settings and tweaks, but the quality is good even on the basic default settings. The headphone output has plenty of power to drive high-end in-ear headphones, though you'll need a dedicated amp if you want to use it with high-impedance cans like the Sennheiser HD650.

In general, Cowon provides very good file format support for audio and video. High-quality audio formats like OGG, FLAC, APE, and WAV are always plusses in our book (in addition to the standard MP3 and WMA), and there's enough legal DRM-free content out there thanks to Amazon's music store that we're no longer concerned much with DRM support. For video, the Q5W handles the usual suspects like AVI (DivX, XviD, and MPEG-4), WMV, ASF, and MPG, as well as OGM.

Image Courtesy of Cowon

Battery life

13 hours for audio playback is simply not impressive, though we were able to squeeze more out by keeping things like screen brightness down (or off), turning off any sound enhancements, and disabling WiFi and Bluetooth. 7 hours of video playback is respectable, though your mileage will vary greatly depending on video format and resolution.

Extras

The FM radio reception is simply awful; we could hear lots of noise in the background, even with stronger stations, and fringe stations were left out entirely. There’s a graphical linear dial, but you can’t actually use it with the stylus or your finger; you can only scan or seek. Oddly, you've got to set the speaker to "off" in the radio's settings menu; it doesn't automatically switch off when you plug in headphones, as with the music and video players.

Photos look extremely sharp with good color on the built-in LCD. You get a lot of control, including panning and zooming, rotating, and slide shows, plus you can view EXIF data. Combined with the USB Host feature, these items make the Q5W a solid choice for shutterbugs who want to offload and show off their shots. Best of all: RAW support (up to 10MB per image). 

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the Cowon Q5W is more expensive and more complicated than it ought to be. Hardware-wise, it's big and heavy, and the touchscreen really requires the stylus to be effective. Software-wise, this thing is kind of a nightmare, but we'd be willing to forgive Cowon if they'd update the firmware with a redesigned interface minus the seemingly redundant settings menus. Still, tech-savvy photographers could potentially be satisfied with the Q5W, though we're more impressed with the Epson P5000's extremely high-res screen, which is still the best in the business.

The AV quality is certainly worthy of the Cowon name, but the chunky body, high price, and mediocre interface and Web experience, make us more inclined to choose the slimmer and cheaper Archos 605 WiFi.


Pros:

• Broad feature set.
• Excellent audio and video quality


Cons:

• Sluggish response
• Heavy and chunky.
• Poorly designed interface