Cowon iAudio6 4GB - Black

An included cable lets you download files from many USB devices, as well as charge the internal lithium ion battery when the player is attached to a PC. I hooked it up to my 8-megapixel digital camera and succeeded in archiving several high-quality JPEG images to the player, albeit very slowly. This could be useful if you're away from home and your camera's memory card is getting full.

Viewing the images on the iAudio 6's tiny screen was hardly worth the effort. At just 1.3 inches diagonal and 160 by 128 pixels, the screen makes it difficult to discern detail. Worse, each image took about 14 seconds to display, though I was able to listen to music while I waited. By contrast, videos scaled down and converted to MPEG-4 using the included software were easier to watch.

I found reception from the built-in FM radio to be quite reasonable for such a small unit, though it varied as I wandered around town. The iAudio 6 is also capable of recording from the radio (including timer recordings), the built-in microphone, and the line input. Music I recorded from the radio sounded surprisingly good when transferred to my PC, if a little bass heavy.

The iAudio 6 earned a rating of Good in PC World's new audio-quality tests. It scored well for its high signal-to-noise ratio and reached a high volume level before introducing distortion, but we registered much harmonic distortion and cross talk compared to other players (cross talk is the bleeding of the left or right channel into the other channel, which narrows the stereo image). The audio quality sounded adequate to me when listening with the included earbuds (our tests don't measure audio quality from the earbuds but, rather, directly from the headphone jack).

Paul Jasper