Grundig VP6200 personal media player

Another media player goes after Archos' crown.

The range of features on offer here is nothing if not impressive. This PMP/media jukebox/call it what you will from Grundig pumps out music, shows off your digital photos and plays back videos. As well as all this, there's a built-in camera that can be used for taking 1.3-megapixel snaps or shooting video straight to the 30GB hard drive.

Video is excellently done. Loaded up with some DivX-encoded episodes of Invasion, the silky-smooth playback really impressed. Its bright, sharp 4:3 screen is outstanding, and it does a stellar job with photos, too.

Music support isn't quite up to the same standard. You can play MP3 and standard WMA files, but not protected tracks such as those from the iTunes store. Playback is slightly disappointing, with tunes such as The Heathen by Bob Marley lacking the finesse you hear on a player such as the Creative Zen Vision:M.

The washed-out snaps and jerky video from the camera are Second Division stuff too, but the real drawback is the menu system, which rapidly becomes as irritating as a never-ending loop of Joe Pasquale reading the shipping forecast. The worst of its many foibles is that you can only access music tracks via a simple file browser, so there's no way to quickly search for songs by artist or title.

The big competitor to this product is the Archos AV 500, which costs around £20 less. The Archos is more polished and can record video from an external source such as a DVD player or set-top box, although there's no camera.

So while the screen and video playback are excellent, the low quality camera and iffy menu system mean we'd opt for the cheaper Archos model.