Video
Browsing videos is helped by a preview mode which plays the video in a small window within the file browser – a really useful feature. All of our test video files played with ease on the device. Unless you have a very obscure collection of file formats, you’ll love this device. Fast forward and rewind speeds up to 32x are available during playback.
For those of you who love movies, the EM7080 is an enthusiast’s delight. There are a swathe of video formats supported, and the EM7080 is the first device we’ve reviewed that has so many options for audio output settings. Individual controls are available for AC3, DTS, AAC and WMA Pro audio output, with the ability to output the signal as HDMI dual channel (downmix), HDMI Multi Channel, HDMI Raw (Bitstream), SPDIF Downmix PCM and SPDIF Raw (Bitstream). If you’re using the device with a dedicated receiver, you’ll have hours of fun configuring the audio as you wish.
With regard to video output, again there are a lot of tweaks available, with both 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios on offer, overscan settings, standard brightness and contrast settings, digital noise reduction, resolution formats from NTSC, PAL and 480p through to 60Hz 1080p.
Subtitle support is included as well as parental controls if you require. It’s a level of detail we’ve not seen before in a digital media receiver, and is very impressive indeed.
Photo
Photo slideshows look great on screen – settings can be tweaked to change the timing between each image, transition selection (Random, Cross Fade, Left to Right, Top to Bottom, Waterfall, Snake, Dissolve and Strip Left Down), Ken Burns effect and Background Music.
Music
The EM7080 plays a huge repertoire of music formats, including FLAC and OGG for the audiophiles. We found accessing music on the home server to be relatively slow and cumbersome using the devices uPnP connection, but Samba was fast and responsive. Whilst audio tags displayed correctly on screen, we were disappointed to see that album art did not show on screen, which lessened the experience somewhat.
Web Services
The EM7080 can also reach out and access a wide range of content from online service providers, including YouTube, SHOUTcast, RSS Feeds, Vimeo, Gametrailers.com, Revision3, blip.tv, Flickr, Picasa and CNN. An RSS newsreader is also thrown in for good measure.
Conclusions
Eminent’s EM7080 is a very highly accomplished digital media receiver. The hardware is a little large, but looks good and provides room for a 3.5” hard drive for local storage, whilst the receiver itself offers fantastic file format support and a strong feature set, especially for movie buffs with home cinema setups. Whilst there are some niggles with file access over uPnP, and the audio and photo experiences lack the pizzazz of movies, Eminent have done a great job integrating a wide range of popular online web services to keep you entertained long after your local media has started to grow stale.
At £124.99, it’s a complete steal – iron out a couple of rough edges, and you have a fantastic DMR that will gobble up and play any media you care to throw at it with style, Highly recommended.
