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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

 

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The HornetTek Fantasy comes in a much smaller box than we were expecting. The different sides of the box display the various features of the media player.
 

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Upon opening the box, we get our first look at the MP-1055 HD Media player. HornetTek wasn’t kidding when they said this was the world’s smallest HD media playback device. Further inside the box we got to the included items. A remote, component cables, power cable, batteries for the remote and a user manual are all included with the Fantasy. Unfortunately, the Fantasy doesn’t come with an HDMI video cable, so users must obtain their own.
 

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Once we got the Fantasy out of the box and all the protective plastic, we got to see it’s modern and professional design. The front has a USB 2.0 slot and SD card slot to plug storage devices in to play media from. On the back of the MP-1055, we can see the component, optical, HDMI and power plugs along with the devices power switch. The bottom side of the Fantasy reveals four rubber feet to allow proper air flow through the vents.
 

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The sides of the Fantasy also have vents to allow air to flow throughout the device to keep it cool while playing media.

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.

OUR VERDICT: HornetTek Fantasy MP-1055
Performance 10
Value 8
Quality 9
Features 9
Innovation 9
We are using a new addition to our scoring system to provide additional feedback beyond a flat score. Please note that the final score isn’t an aggregate average of the new rating system.
Total 9.5
Pros Cons

Great video playback quality

Crisp audio playback quality

Looks great

Small Size

Affordable Price

No HDMI cable included

Certain USB drives aren’t capable of video playback

 

 

 

Summary: Overall, the HornetTek Fantasy MP-1055 HD Media Player performed astoundingly with clean and accurate audio and video playback. The device itself looks great and operates silently. The Fantasy earns a 9.5/10 rating and the Bjorn3D.com Golden Bear Award.

 

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