Iomega ScreenPlay TV Link

Full Review

The market is already awash with media player products that offer support for playing from USB storage devices. Iomega enters the fray with the ScreenPlay TV Link, a device that lets you plug and play your media files on your TV without the need for a player or a PC.

The size of a deck of cards, weighing just 99.9g, the black half-metal, half-plastic body of the ScreenPlay TV Link tightly packs all the essential ports (Component, Composite, HDMI and USB) at the back. It draws power from the AC adapter and plays audio and video files. That includes MP3, WAV, WMA, AC3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (AVI/DivX/XviD). It also reads JPEG photos. Using the HDMI or Component outputs, the user can choose video settings from 480p/720p/1080i though 720p and 1080i are only supported in upscaled formats. It supports drives with NTFS or FAT32 file systems and Iomega's own Rev USB drive. The package bundles all necesary cables apart from the all important HDMI cable.

Our 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go external HDD and 32GB Kingston DataTraveler pendrive worked perfectly with it. Once plugged in, its simple interface pulled up all the contents quickly. However, we wish the player's interface was more polished as browsing a long list of files was painful and there is no option for search, nor page up or down functionality.

Playing our DVD-ripped videos, audio and photos was a hassle free experience. We liked the VOB playback feature with all the original menu structures retained. The up-scaling 480i/480p or 576p feature did a commendable job, especially on our 40-inch Philips HDTV. The absence of True HD playback was a downer and so were unsupported video formats. However, the portable design and the simplistic approach to playing off a USB device makes it a viable option. If it played Full HD and supported more multimedia file formats, the ScreenPlay TV Link would surely grab more attention. Now about six months after the TV-Link's release, Iomega has announced enhanced editions of ScreenPlay products, for which you might prefer to hold out.

Bottom Line

The Iomega ScreenPlay TV Link is definitely one of the better priced media players currently. The WDTV HD and Asus O!Play HDP-R1 are both priced higher. However the TV-Link can neither offer the "plays any media file you throw at it" line, nor is it as cheap as a DVD Player with similar functionality. It thus gets bogged down into a zone where it is neither "here" (HD media players) nor "there" (standard DVD players).