Conclusion

VIZO Milano is a major improvement over the Opera. Although it is bigger in size, it uses the conventional 3.5" HDD. As it uses the IDE inteface, there might be some difficulties for some readers where they no longer stock large quantities of IDE HDDs. You might have to grab some of your old hdds to fit into this device.

Setting up this device is easy. It is inituitive. The weird thing is that the firmware we have has some functions that are not available for this device. I am not sure if it is meant to be so or for future usage.

The picture quality is pretty good considering the quality of some of the mpeg4 files playbacked at 1080i. DVDs copied into the HDD playbacked in 1080i too without much pixelation.

One of the things that VIZO overlooked could be the audio output for Component Video. I know that most people would have some digital audio device for 5.1 decoding. For me, if I were to use component video, I have no audio! I think it would be better to have both Optical out and conventional RCA type of output for those who wants to enjoy component video clarity but can't afford a AV receiver to decode 5.1 yet.

So far, most of the files we threw at it played well without any issues. WE have not tested the DIVX HD and we doubt it will be able to playback as it is not listed as supported media type. A issue is with Asian subtitles. We threw in a Korean movie and the subtitles did not turn out right.

Overall, this product is quite interesting and we look forward to seesing more improvements in its firmware to correct some of the early bugs that appears on subtitles etc. The quality of the Component cable should be improved too. There are a couple of times the LCD TV is unable to detect the video source.

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.