With so many media viewers available, the P-7000 from Epson is something of a surprise. It costs a lot more than most and is considerably bigger. About the size of the body of a traditional SLR camera, the viewer combines a 102mm (4-inch) LCD display with a 160GB hard drive and firmware to display still photos and video and to play music. Its prime task is storing and showing photos, though.

The LCD is a bit special, as it uses four colour filters rather than the normal three. This is to increase the colour gamut of the display, so it can get closer to the wider Adobe RGB colour space. It's certainly a fine display and shows off its colour capabilities well with the sample stills and videos. Using our normal tests shots, where we know the colours we expect to see, it's still very true to the original shades.

Displaying images from thumbnails uses the control dial at the top-right of the display, and there's a thumbwheel for scrolling through them. While control is quite simple, the unit is crying out for a touch-screen and multi-touch control, similar to devices from Archos or Apple.

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You can transfer photos from an SD or CompactFlash card and files can also be transferred via USB. The viewer supports the JPG filetype and several RAW formats for more professional cameras, including Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax and Sony, as well as Epson, of course.

Video playback is fine, though sound is thin and scratchy on the internal speaker. Fortunately, there's a headphone socket on the side, too, which gives good sound. You can print directly from the viewer and even make basic edits, though again the lack of any form of touch screen or stylus control limits these.

The P-7000 is the more expensive, professional model of two products in this new range, and has twice the drive capacity of the P-6000 with a Travel Pack included. The Travel Pack comprises useful extras like a dual battery charger, a case, a stand and a car power adapter. The Li-ion battery - only one is supplied, despite the charger - lasts for around three hours, so it should be fine for viewing photos, but you may need a second pack if watching videos on the P-7000.

There are viewers available that offer more features and higher capacity in a thinner, more convenient format, but the P-7000 is designed for high quality photo viewing and in this, it delivers.

There's little doubt the P-7000 does an excellent job of storing and displaying photos. If you're a professional or semi-pro photographer, it's a good place to keep large numbers of high resolution images when you're away from home. If you have less challenging needs, there are smaller and especially cheaper ways of storing and displaying data.