Ed Heckman writes:
<< Cool! I also ordered the blue one. (Supposedly it will ship this Monday.)
How does it look? I wonder which one will be the most popular.
I haven't seen a good picture of the display anywhere on the web. It
seems to be very small, but packed with information. Can you give a brief
review of it? How well does it handle? In other words, how comfortable is
it to use the buttons/jog levers while holding it with one or both hands?
>>
I think the blue looks nice. A little more green in it than the blue on the
R-50. Slightly irridescent.
The controls work well. Ergonomics are fine. Personally, I think Sony
generally does a good job in this respect. One thing that takes a little
getting used to is the right jog is used for the play button. You push the
jog in for play. That is not as nice as just pushing a button. Otherwise,
the jogs work as on the R-90. The right jog is for play control and the
other is for menus. Both can be used once you are in the menus for titling
etc, but both are not required. You could use one hand to press to select a
menu choice and the other to scroll between options. That would be efficient
if you had both hands free.
The display is fine. I can't think of anything that was on the R-90 that is
missing on the R-900 display. The level meter is horizontal and only goes
halfway across the display, so it is difficult to tell where the peak level
is until you get a reference point. There are no calibration marks for this,
so that is not great, but it corresponds with the far right hand edge of the
"rec mode" button. I wish Sony had not dropped the disc capacity and play
location meter that is on the R-50. That was handy, but was dropped on the
R-90 (R-55?). Perhaps I was the only one who used it.
A few features are in menu commands that would be nice to have as buttons.
Some of these are buttons on the remote (display, sound) but I can understand
the button reduction to be a good cost/complexity reduction opportunity for a
designer.
The unit still defaults to "headphone" out when you change discs, even if you
have been using line out. A previous poster asked about this. This is the
same as the R-90, but it is a pain. I use an Airhead amp to drive my
Etymotics on planes so I use line out often.
For Larry, I must say, the unit is working great so far. Completely
reliable, as I reach the end of week one of operation :)
Regards,
Leland
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