HornetTek Fantasy MP-1055 HD Media Player

How well does the world’s smallest HD media player, the HornetTek Fantasy perform? Keep reading to find out!

Introduction

In today’s media-based society, bigger and better televisions are being released at a very rapid pace. To keep up with all the new televisions and other display devices being put on the market, other companies have started coming out with innovative media play-back devices. These devices come in many different sizes and colors with various hardware setups.

HornetTek, a company specializing in hard drive enclosures, is now taking its first steps into the world of media playback devices with the HornetTek Fantasy MP-1055 HD Media Player. The Fantasy is supposedly the world’s most compact media player that supports full HD playback. The Fantasy has a $64.99 price tag.

Keep reading to see how well the Fantasy performs!

Specifications

This media player can play all the most commonly used file formats used in movies being released today. As for the supported audio formats, for movies and music, the Fantasy has the capability of playing the most comonly used codecs available. A very nice feature is the support for the FLAC music codec. FLAC, or free lossless audio codec, offers the highest quality of music rips.

Now, let’s move on to the pictures!

pictures

Test Methodology

Testing a media playback device is a very difficult thing to do considering the only way to test it is to hook it up to the television and judge it’s performance based off our opinions. We will be using a 6 foot gold-tipped HDMI cable plugged into our Sony 52 inch HDTV.

An .mkv rip of Batman: The Dark Knight in Blu-Ray will be played, followed by an .avi format and .mp4 format of the same movie. This will give us an excellent idea of how well the Fantasy can play Blu-ray and DVD quality movies. At the same time it will give us an idea of how well the Fantasy does with surround sound. After that we will begin testing picture quality with several large, extremely detailed pictures.

Test results

During our testing of the Fantasy MP-1055 HD Media Player, we quickly found that certain older USB drives do not have the bandwidth to play movies and will cause the video to freeze, but the audio would sometimes continue to play. However, once we started using a USB hard drive, we no longer had the issue.

The Fantasy played everything we threw at it like a champ, especially the large 7.92GB Blu-Ray copy of The Dark Knight. Picture quality was equivalent to an actual Blu-Ray disc and the audio playback was exceptional. The colors of the movie and pictures we displayed were properly shown on the screen by the MP-1055. Music played by the device also had great sound quality.

conlcusion

The HornetTek Fantasy MP-1055 HD Media Player has a very compact layout with a very sleek and professional looking design that will look great in most living rooms. To go with it’s compact design and good looks, the Fantasy operates silently and the only noise generated was by the hard drive we used to play media.

The Fantasy is a very well rounded high definition media player that supports all the latest and greatest codecs available for all common media today. Not only does it support the most common codecs, it also plays them back very well. During our testing, we found that the Fantasy could handle any and everything we had to throw at it. When we first fired up a .mkv Blu-ray movie file, we noticed the picture quality was equal to an actual Blu-Ray disc, which is awesome! The Fantasy didn’t have any issues with playing multiple movies over a 6 hour period.

The audio playback of music and movies left us extremely impressed. The sound was crystal clear and the Fantasy didn’t have any problems playing any of the supported audio codecs. Pictures were also crystal clear and were displayed with accurate colors.