detail information

After removing the unit from its polystyrene home, straight away you are taken by how good the unit looks. The case is constructed completely of black glossy plastic and has the great looks of a piece of AV equipment that belongs next to your shiny plasma or LCD. It appears professionally built and has all the hallmarks of an AV device that you would want your friends to admire and drool over.

The unit‟s dimensions are 189mm (W) x 140mm (D) x 70mm (H). The player has a row of buttons along the top which allow access to the device and functions without having to rummage under and between cushions to find the damn remote control. As it often turns out, these will hardly be used as we hate to get up off our lazy couch. They are considered a backup when leaving home without remote and such.

The unit has the Sigma 8623L at the heart of its board which, is dated and hints that there may be issues with the stated playback of “Full 1080p”. Internally, as with many media players, it can take an HDD (SATA) which is inserted into the device through the same location and opening as the TViX M-6500a. It‟s obvious the Markus 800 is influenced by the DViCo player, probably resulting from its success over the years. (For those readers with the M-6500a you would feel right at home with this device.)

The unit is very well constructed and laid out internally. There are no signs or quick fixes with wires as we have seen before in other units. No internal power supplies is a benefit and means less heat is generated from internal components. No noisy large fan but a tiny one in the rear should keep things cooled. Only time will tell if the cooler will become noisy (small ones often do) or if it is capable keeping the heat of the 8623L chip within normal operation levels. Once again impressive I tell you! Well done Novatron for thought and good design.

FRONT AND TOP PANEL

The Markus 800 has both front and top panel controls. The front panel consists of two buttons. From the left, you have the soft touch embedded On/Off button which is encircled with a Blue LED. To the right there is a small circular TV Out button which allows you to change from SD to HD video outputs. Above this button is the IR window which is unobtrusive and blends well. Finally to the right are three small blue LED lights which specify what video mode is currently running: Video, HDTV or HDMI.

In the centre is the long awaited feature to the media player market, a two inch color LCD screen. The screen allows for menu navigation and music file playback without the use of an external panel, but we will go into this a little later in the review. We probably should mention the TViX and Ziova players had this feature already be it in a simpler form displaying one line of text only.

Along the top are the main navigation buttons which we already showed you. Immediately left you have the Setup button which carries out setup functions as the name suggests. The beauty now though is you can carry out the setup of the device using the LCD screen. (This may not seem a lot, but believe me when you change to the wrong video mode and have just a black screen, this function is very useful.) One small flaw here is that the Markus 800 does not display whatever output is currently set during switching.

Right of the Setup button is the Stop button. The main navigation is carried out by the circular navigation pad centered in the middle. To the right of this pad is the Play button and to the right of this is the confirmation or OK button.

The only additional item on the top of the unit is the Markus logo in white with a gold “Full 1080p” logo. Oh and not forgetting the mandatory sticker listing some of the formats it can playback along with its highlights like 2” LCD screen, HDMI E-SATA etc.

REAR PANEL

The rear panel is very well laid out considering the amount of outputs and inputs the Markus 800 provides. It truly does not matter in which way you want to use the player; a connection is available, all except VGA maybe.

The holds the following items and I/O’s:

• Power socket
• 10/100 network port - no gigabit on this device due to the limitations of the processor but 10/100 is more than adequate for HD playback and still exceeds the ability of what the Sigma processor could possibly handle.
• USB slave (allows the unit to present itself as a USB HDD to a PC).
• E-SATA (allows the unit to present itself as a eSATA HDD to a PC)
• 2 USB host ports which will come in handy for use with external HDD and the newly mentioned 11N Wi-Fi USB stick that Hantech will be releasing soon.
• HDMI 1.1a
• Component
• Composite
• S-Video
• Coaxial and Optical digital outputs
• IR extender port

Good variety of possible outputs with all kinds of devices and TV‟s. Yes, you don‟t even need a HD TV to use this player as it is capable of both downscaling and up-scaling.

What's in the box?

Setup and Play