The media player market has exploded over the past few years if you didn’t notice and it seems you can find then with just about every option imaginable.There are times though when you don’t want or need all those options, you just want something basic that is easy to use and plays your media like its supposed to.  Today for review I’ve got the Hornettek Fantasy HD media player that’s small and portable, very easy to use but yet it will play most any type of media file out there today. The Fantasy offers HDMI or composite connection along with SPDIF for optical if you want to go that route. The Fantasy doesn’t use a hard drive, you can use either a USB drive or memory card to get your media to your TV making life that much simpler. Let’s check it out…

Info:

Product Name: Fantasy

Author: Kristofer Brozio

Provider: Hornettek

Price: $74.99 (from Amazon at time of review)

Sit back, relax, and enjoy your HD movies, photos, and music with Hornettek Fantasy!  Compact and sleek design, Hornettek Fantasy is a powerful media player that comes with Full HD-video playback (up to 1080p), Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound enabled.  Simply plug any USB storage device or insert SD card to Hornettek Fantasy, you can easily play your favorite movies, music and pictures on your TV with a user-friendly control. Hornettek Fantasy’s feature menu allows you to quickly browse and play any movies, photos and music from connected USB storage devices and SD card.  It also supports today’s most popular media formats (MKV, RMVB…etc).

With special air-circulation design, Hornettek Fantasy is a noise-free device with strong digital media processor which ensures long hours of best quality movies, music, and photos playback.  Supporting both PAL and NTSC television formats, the Hornettek Fantasy will automatically adjust between PAL and NTSC to fit almost all TV standards around the world.

Model: mp1055

Exterior Interfaces:
Video Output:
-Composite Out
-HDMI 1.3 Out

Audio Output :
Audio L/R Out
SPDIF(Optical)

File Transfer Port:
-USB 2.0 port -2 Ports
-SD/MS Card Reader

Multi-Media Support:
Video Decoding:
(Movie)
MPEG-1: MPG/MPEG/DAT support up to 1080p
MPEG-2: MPG/MPEG/VOB/ISO/IFO/TS/
TP/M2TS support up to 1080p
MPEG-4: MP4/AVI/MOV support up to 1080p
DivX 3/4/5/6 XviD     AVI/MKV support up to 1080p
H.264, AVC: TS/AVI/MKV/MOV/M2TS support up to 1080p
(Main and High Profile @Level 4.1 : limitation of 50Mbps,
Baseline profile @Level 3.1
WMV9: WMV support up to 1080p
Real Video 8/9/10: RM/RMVB support up to 720p
FLV: FLV support up to 640×480

Audio Decoding:
(Movie)Dolby Digital AC3, DTS
MPEG-I Layer 1/2/3, MPEG-II Layer 1/2, Real Audio, AAC, WMA, LPCM
HDMI RAW/SPDIF RAW output for Amplifier decoding 5.1/7.1 audio channels

Audio Decoding:
(Music)WMA, MP3 Real Audio (RA), WAV, OGG, AAC, FLAC (MKA,LPCM,ADPCM,WMA Pro)

Picture Format: JPEG, BMP, PNG(TIFF, GIF-no Support animation mode)

The Review::

The Fantasy comes in a little box as it’s small product.

Inside you’ll find the Fantasy, remote control, batteries, user manual, power supply and a composite video cable. The Fantasy can be used with HDMI but sadly one isn’t included in the box.

The remote is rather colorful. It has buttons like those you’d find on any media device along with ones specific to the Fantasy and its functions. On the bottom of course you’ll find the battery compartment.

The Fantasy is very small measuring about 4.5” x 4” x 1”. It’s black in color and actually has a plexi glass covering on it that allows you to see inside when powered on, well sort of as it’s very dark in color but yet semi-transparent. On the front you’ll see a card reader and USB port along with a power indicator that will light up when powered on. The entire Fantasy unit is very glossy and looks great really.

On the back you’ll see connections for composite, SPDIF, HDMI, and power along with the main power switch.

On the bottom are rubber feet and cooling vents.

I hooked it up via HDMI and composite to my 47” HDTV, both worked flawlessly. The composite was a bit fuzzy, but that’s to be expected. I used a regular USB drive for my media.

Here’s a couple pictures of the Fantasy powered on, you can see the LEDs inside.

The glossy finish of the Fantasy does easily collect dust and fingerprints

I mentioned the cover is semi-transparent, if you hold a flashlight up to the cover it becomes see-through and you can see the components much better.

Ok, so let’s see what the interface looks like. When you first turn it on without any media plugged in only the explorer and the settings are highlighted. There is no fancy splash screen or anything like that, the Fantasy just gets done to business as it were.

Let’s start with Settings, here you’ll find choices for System, Audio, Video and Misc.

Under System you’ll find choices for Language, Text Encoding, Time, auto-play, keyboard language, scan auto on or off, resume play or set to factory default.

Under the Audio settings you’ll only find three for Night Mode, HDMI Output options or SPDIF output options.

Under the Video settings you’ll see choices for Aspect Ratio, TV System, Zoom, DNR, 1080P 24HZ on or off, Depp Color and CVBS/YPbBr switching.

Under Misc  you’ll only see choices for Version info and USB Upgrades.

When I put my USB drive into the Fantasy it scanned it and the icons at the main menu light up.

I put three different video files on the USB drive just to test it out, .AVI, .WMV and .MOV, they were a mix of standard and HD. All three played just fine of course. Later I tried an HD .MKV file as well and it worked great. The videos I tried all played great with no skips or jumps, or course HD files were much better. The audio is very good as well. I have my HDTV hooked up to a Sony home theater system and the sound is great.

You can press the option button on the remote for a menu to pop up with choices for Searching and changing how the files are arranged.

An interesting thing I noticed is that you don’t have to go back to the main menu, it will just pop up at the bottom of the screen for you. You can also access the same things from the remote as well.

To access the photos you’ll need to navigate to them of course, they’ll show as thumbnails for you to choose which one you want to see. You can pick one to go full screen and for the slideshow to start.  Like the movie menu you can press the option button for a sub-menu to show more choices and viewing options.

When I went to music it didn’t show as I expected it to, it just opened up the album and showed the songs. Like the others you can open up the sub-menu by hitting options for more sorting choices. When you play music the player will appear next to a track list. You’ll need to use MP3 files with ID tags to show more information, I used WMA files and they didn’t show the info for the songs.

The last choice is the file browser, it basically shows everything uncategorized. When you open it up the choice will be for USB if you have one attached or SD of course or even both will show up for you to choose from.

You might wonder what the point of the composite connection is well it’s still useful for a number of things I think, so it’s good to have it there. There is HDMI connection that should satisfy everyone else, but too bad Hornettek didn’t include one with the Fantasy.

One thing I do miss is a network connection, it would have been nice to have one or at least the ability to add it via a wireless USB dongle like other media players out there. Still though considering everything that the Fantasy can do, I think it’s not a bad product.

Conclusion:

The Fantasy is an excellent basic media player that plays most every type of media format out there. It’s very easy to use and it has an elegant but simplistic design that should allow it to fit well with any décor or home theater setup. The small size will allow you to put it most any place in your home or even take it with you. The picture and sound quality is excellent.

Overall I like the Fantasy media player, but the price is questionable, coming in at $75.00. For slightly less than that you can a media player with hard drive capability and networking built-in. If I was Hornettek I’d lower the price a bit to be more competitive, especially since the market is flooded with these things. The Fantasy is a great performing and great looking media player that has a lot to offer really.

Edit: Hornettek just informed me that you can get the Fantasy for $59.99 at Microcenter: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0363651

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Scores::	9 out of 10
Overall:
Aesthetic:
Value / Price:
Build Quality:
Usability:

Disclosure:This product was given to Review the Tech for review by the company for review purposes only, and is not considered by us as payment for the review, we do not, and never will, accept payment from companies to review their products. This product may have also been bought by us for review purposes and does not influence the review.