I have a bunch of argosy players & the later ones are quite acceptable, imhp. I cant find much, good or bad, about them. Does anyone out here have one? Comments, please. Their web site dissapeared, completely, & no one sells 'em anymore. What gives? My 1st was a Lasonic (I think the same folks) 670 dvd/hdd player which was ok but limited functionality. last was their HV 359 which is for me the best one. "Plus all in between" Anybody?? a
I bought argosy hv 335t a couple of years ago for my mom to use. I got tired of creating dvds for her. My only complaint was playing widescreen movies. She had one of those old time standard screen TVs and the picture would be cropped. Her DVD player did not crop the video and played it in widescreen as expected. I liked it since it just plain worked. I never looked to see if there was a firmware update or something for it. This was before the one came out that would record video. That's something my mom would have really wanted but they were a few months away from release at the time. I stopped keeping track of their progress and now it seems the players have disappeared. Too bad.
I have 3 of the 335 models gave one to my Niece with a 2TB drive installed and one to my Nephew with a 2TB drive installed and also a 3TB WD external drive. The 3TB drive had to be partitioned as a 2TB and 1TB as the Argosy can only read max 2Tb drive, it shows up as USB 1 and USB 2 on player. The third I gave to my son connected to my network of movies. I also have 2 of the 359 recording models. Both had network problems, one would not work with wired ethernet, but worked ok on my 300Mbps wireless router. The recording was terrible so I never used them for that. The internal drive and USB drives worked fine on them. The fan quit on the 335 of my son's and it would get hot and freeze up so I gave him one of my 359 model, but without the cover it's fine until I replace the fan. I like the players was sorry to not be able to find them any longer. But will try WD media players for next ones. Some firmware and manuals are still available here.... http://www.argosy.tw/support_drivers.html
I have two of the '335's' one older one & one 'VR'. I upgraded the firmware on both to get the 'volume control' function to work. The only difference I can tell is, with the 'VR' unit, the light goes off when the player is turned off, & with the older one, after plugging in power, you must 'turn on' the unit (turning on the remote function). I've not had any problems with 4/3 movies. On my TV, they appear with the 'bars on the sides. With '4/3 letterbox' (garbage boxed!), I go into setup -> video -> aspect ratio -> 4/3 letterbox "OK", then set my tv to (my Olevia 242, aspect ratio = zoom 2, the setting for zooming '4-3l-b' to fill the screen, a bit of the pic gets cropped). I dont know the settings for other sets. On the older hv335, I plugged in the back port a 'usb 'a to b'' cable that has leds in each plug end, when the plug 'light goes out, I know the player is off. I also have one hv359, the only difference I can find is, the recording function,& it seems to have MUCH higher audio output. I bought an 'Airlink' dongle & tried it, but stopped using it, not worth the effort. -corne-
