Cyclone Micro 2+ Full HD HDMI 1080p MultiMedia Player Adaptor

Firstly, if money is no object, please stop reading and just go ahead and buy this instead:Western Digital TV HD 1080P Media Player

Otherwise this Sumvision is, in the following ways only, a bit like the 'poorer cousin' of the 'WD TV HD 1080p' (hereinafter 'WD'). All of which are still worth mentioning to you fellow prospective buyers in advance.

1) The remote on the Cyclone is really as hit or miss as others have suggested. In contrast, the WD's remote just works. Another reviewer has reported success with replacing the remote with a One For All; which is probably a good solution.

2) Firmware: on the Sumvision site I was surprised to find that there is no new firmware to be downloaded, nor indeed anything which suggests that any further firmware will be released in the future (the manual does however mention a possibility of updates, but as there aren't any already, I'll not be holding my breath for them). In contrast, should you splash out on the WD you will find that the product will be supported with firmware updates - until at least WD release a newer model. (Alas, I owned the original 1st gen 'WD Live' and they, naughty WD!, no longer support it). So when you buy the Cyclone, that's it, thanks very much and don't bother us with... Sumvision's idea of firmware updates seems to be: "why bother fixing something so cheap when we can just release another updated unit to repace it". Hmmm.

3) Now, when I try to change the video setting to 1080p, which my Phillips definitely supports, that option is blanked out and all I am allowed is the inferior 1080i. No matter what I do, I can find no way to enable 1080p in the Cyclone's settings. Alas, were this a WD this would be no issue at all.

4) Sound - now, I have multichannel Phillips Home Cin unit, which any WD media player will play sound through all 5 speakers. However, even when multichannel 6.1 is selected as the sound option in the Cyclone, the sound is still only stereo. That is, no matter what I do with the Cyclone's options, it still produces sound through only the front 2 of my 5 potential speakers. Others may have had more luck than I had with this, but then again, at this low price, how could you expect so 6.1 sound to work perfectly on all system setups!? Well, I did, but perhaps that was expecting too much at this fantastically low price.

5) Lastly, its picture quality, although quite brilliant in itself as others have said, is so very slightly not as lively and vibrant as the WD's. Maybe that was because it did not let me enable 1080p on my setup, but I'm sure there's another reason why the picture quality is not quite the same as the WD's. Still, so near & excellent still, but just not quite the same.

And now for the pluses:

Price: wow, yes this item is extremely inexpensive for what it does. Its price is absolutely brilliant. It makes the WD look very expensive in comparison.

Picture Quality: still brilliant despite what I suggest in comparison to the WD's

Size: This Cyclone is surprisingly tiny. You could fit two of them into a shirt pocket and still have room for another. It's amazing that Sumvision managed to pack high def technology into such a tiny package for such a brilliant price.

In conclusion: For many people, there really is so little between the players and so much difference in price that it would make no sense to purchase the dearer unit. For me though, I must dock one star for the irritating remote, my lack of 1080p (no probs with 720p and 1080i though) and the fact that on my system at least, I am restricted to stereo sound only. YMMV but I would definitely recommend this Sumvision at the price, unless you are a perfectionist without regard for price in which case you should already have bought the WD TV HD 1080. Thanks for reading one of my reviews which I hope was helpful for you. Please ask me any questions in comments, and I'll try to be helpful in responding if I see it as I do try to return to my most recent reviews quite frequently.

After reading all the reviews on this product i decided to gamble which I thick most people are doing when
buying something that has all the functionality this device has at the price it is.

I tested this device on a LG 42" (42LG70YD) TV and a Acer 19" pc monitor (P193w, with hdmi to vga adapter)
with a Kingson Datatraveler 8gig & 16gig pen drive/memory stick
the files I tested :

Battle Los Angeles - Full blue ray 1080p into MKV 7.2 gig file.
Inception - blue-ray compressed 720p into a MP4 3.4 gig file.
Wall-e - blue ray compressed 720P into a MKV x264 699mb file.
Horrible Bosses - DVDrip 700mb AVI file.
Audio files in MP3,WMV,FLAC,OGG
Picture files in JPG,PNG,GIF

The Result ?
This device did not skip a beat on anything.
I was abit worried at first because of the reviews about juddering playback and stuff like that
but after time i was just trying to make it fail.
pausing,playing,pause again,fastforward,stop film, resume, pull the memory stick out during playback .etc
and it just isnt giving up.

Downsides ?
Well...umm...The remote? maybe? I can kind of see peoples views on the remote being shoddy
but really you just have to accept that the remote is a very very "good value" product or "cheap" in other words
and pointing it directly at the device will get the job done and plus the usb input is next to the remote signal receiver
so make sure it isnt blocked by the usb cable or memory stick.

Overall.
For £30 its a steal.
Get it in the basket.

Hope This Review Helps.

Ill start with the negative.

The remote is absolutely shocking. I have read on reviews that the remote was bad but thad been improved with the 2+. If this is true, I cannot imagine what the older model remote was like. To get the remote to work you have to aim in with accuracy at the box directly head on. Even doing this you find yourself pressing the buttons several times until you get a response. To be honest this product fails in Sale Of Goods Act as it is "not fit for purpose".

Adding a 1TB drive full of movies to this box works but the interface has no search function so it takes forever and a day to go through the list to find the movie you want. Its best just to keep it to a selection of movies rather than your whole collection.

Now the positive.

The remote is best replaced with a oneforall which works much better.
Also this box will play absolutely anything I have got to try on it. Full 1080p works well on a variety of containers and codecs, you will not be disappointed for the price.

It has its flaws but its so cheap, I'm going to buy a second for the bedroom tv