Sony Unveils First U.S. Walkman Video Players

Sony today launched two new Walkman players that support both audio and video. The new NWZ-A810 and NWZ-S610 series of Walkman digital music players will support an open platform, providing more choices for downloading and managing music and video collections online.

"Our Walkman products offer great resolution, a bright screen, high-quality sound and a long battery life," said Brennan Mullin, vice president for audio products in the Digital Imaging and Audio Division at Sony Electronics. "We are providing our customers the choice to use multiple music sources."

The video players have a large Quarter Video Graphics Array (QVGA) LCD screen that displays video at 30 frames per second. QVGA is a display mode for small screens in which the resolution is 320 pixels vertically by 240 pixels horizontally.

According to Sony, the battery life allows up to eight hours of video playback for the NWZ-A810 series and nine-and-a-half hours for the NWZ-S610 series. The battery also provides up to 33 hours of music playback for both series.

The players support security-enhanced Windows Media Audio (WMA), as well as non-secure AAC and MP3 music formats, plus JPEG files for photos, in addition to the AVC (H.264/AVC) Baseline Profile and MPEG-4 video codecs.

For those who just want music sans video, Sony is also introducing the NWZ-B100 series. These audio players include USB direct connect, a three-line color LCD display and an FM tuner. They feature up to 12 hours of battery life. It's also equipped with FM recording capability and a voice recorder function with a built-in microphone.

In addition to supporting easy transfer of non-DRM content via drag and drop, this dedicated audio model will also support most subscription services. The players store up to 485 songs on the 2GB and 235 songs on the 1GB, for songs an average of four minutes in length at 128kbps in the MP3 format.