I received this last week the new JXD 980, a 4.3″ screen player which uses the new Sunplus 8000 chipset. The Sunplus 8000 chipset is one of the new generation chipsets capable of playing higher resolution videos, the advertised resolution that is can max handle is 1280×720, other chipsets claim this also and consider them capable of playing ‘720p’ resolution. The Sunplus 8000 can play high resolution videos at a high frame rate and retain audio sync, but not at the advertised resolution of 1280×720.
The overall build quality of the JXD 980 isn’t the best that i have seen, the front does look nice, but the buttons are cheap looking and feel cheap and they all have a very clicky sound to them. The back is not that nice, although it looks nice from a bit of distance, when you touch it the back really feels cheap. Then again the main highlight of the player is the screen and the internal chip.
The main menu UI is very similar to that of previous JXD players and like previous player the overall UI is hideous and reduces the overall functionality of the player. The biggest disappointment is in the music UI, not only is it ghastly, but due to the lack of options, the music player is just useless, use it only if you want to hear music on a shuffle option. The sad part is that the Sunplus 8000 chip has a DSP core so the audio does actually sound good, but the music players UI is so poor that i don’t think many people will want to use this for any audio purposes. Oh on a bit of a bright note, the player does support album art. Check the below gallery for more pictures on the Music UI.
Ok, i won’t beat around the bush, screw all the other functions on this player, they are either under developed or due to the way the player is designed, those other functions can’t be used. ALL this player is really good at is video and it really is quite good for that. The Sunplus 8000 chip, if you can for a moment forget the blatant flase advertising of the 1280×720 res claim, is a remarkable chip for its video playback. I have not had a chance to compare the Sunplus 8000 chip performance with the new 720p chip from Ingenics, but i have a feeling the two would be similar.
I tested this bad boy and videos that were encoded upto 960×540 at a max video bit rate of 260kbps and encoded with AC3 audio at 640/kbps played smoothly with no real lag or lip sync. I downloaded a hi res video of an episode of Heros, this play fine, there was only a bit of jerkiness every 5 minutes ore so and last for about 2 seconds, a marked improvement with what you find with the current RK27xx series of chips. The player CAN actually play videos in a 1280×720p resolution, but the audio never stays in sync and the video plays sluggish.
Don’t read to much into the above image about the TV out, the output quality is a lot nicer than it looks in that image, just my camera couldn’t take a decent snap of the TV with an image on it. The Sunplus 8000 chip does do better than the RK27xx chip players for its TV out quality, the JXD 980 can output videos at 720×480 - which is about DVD quality (in theory). All videos i tried looked nice, but weren’t of DVD quyality, even if the video file was of high resolution, videos looked like a better quality of VCD than DVD. Still quite impressed and i think people would be happy with th quality. The player also does allow for on plater control for when the video is playing and support both NTSC and PAL. One last upside to the TV out, you can output images also and you can use it concurrently with audio.
The TV in quality is a huge improvement over the previous sunplus chipsets, videos are recorded to MP4 format at a 320×240 resolution, so basically it will record stuff and it will look like VCD quality.What was good to see was that it could record right from a DVD player and could smoothly record video playback of a fast moving action sequence, many TV in MP4 Player have recording issue with fast moving sequences.
Lastly i do want to make some additional comments, the screen quality is very nice, good viewing angles, on the spec sheet i got from JXD they state its LTPS, but i am doubtful of that, i think its a good TFT screen, very sharp and chrisp. The button navigation i think is horrible, i will leave the video review to really show how badly implemented this is. The camera interface is simple, but the actual quality of the pictures that the camera can take is nicer than other MP4 Player CMOS camera.
Overall the JXD 980 is a good VIDEO player, i do stress that, everything else about this player is lacking and is poorly developed. I can’t really say if any firmware update would change this, as JXD has a bad habit of never improving their UI and always producing such low grade User Interfaces for their player. If you want this player, then get it for video, it would make for a good video player, but if you get it for any of the other features, well don’t come and complain here if they disappoint you. The JXD 980 will be on sale at MP4 Nation by the start of January and will not retail for more than $100 for the 8GB.
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