UsageWe hooked up the AV{DOCK} to an Onkyo TX-SR308 5.1 Home Theatre Receiver for the audio tests, we compared it to streaming the same audio from a media tank (PopCorn Hour) as well as the iPod connected through the more affordable “headphone” jack dock.
At the end of the day we couldn’t really say that one was better than the other, if there were differences, they were too small to really stand out in our listening tests. Depending on your home theatre you might have a different experience; the use of gold plates RCA connectors is definitely a step above the mainstream headphone jack.
For our video tests we hooked up the AV{DOCK} straight to a Panasonic 42” Plasma screen, native resolution is 1024x768, so 720p output should do fine.
Usage with iPhoneWhen plugging in the iPhone in the dock iOS lets us know the accessory is not “optimized” of the iPhone:
Z{DOCK} recommends that you put your iPhone in “airplane” mode if you plan to use it for extended periods of time in the docking to reduce interference, so we did:
Selecting the iPod app we were able to play back audio through the speakers and video on the large screen; if you don’t own an iPhone or iPod Touch, this is what the music player looks like:
The upscale quality is acceptable for a quick webcast or home movie, feature films and your favorite series should be handled by a HD capable media player to get to the most out of it. The AV{DOCKS} definitely works:
Worth noting here is that the remote control does not work inside the iPod app on the iPhone 3G. We’re also limited to outputting video/audio through the iPod app, there’s no way to display photos on the large screen with the iPhone (unless you put them in a movie on your PC and them upload to the iPhone in MP4 format to be played back in iPod app, but that’s hardly plug and play)
Usage with iPodThe AV{DOCK} seems to be better fitted for use with the iPod, for starters, the remote control works flawlessly to skip tracks and play/pause movies. Upscaling music video works flawlessly, but again the quality is not quite 720p, let alone 420p:
Enabling TV-Out is a simple procedure, you can set it to ON/OFF or ASK every time; you’ll get a pop-up like below, choose ON and the image is displayed in large on your TV:
Browsing photos is possible with the iPod, the iPod display also changes, displaying a thumbnail of the photo you’re watching on the big screen
The picture quality is quite good, unfortunately our camera’s JPG compression introduces a bit of artifacts here, in person the pictures show up nicely:
