The Good

First off, this media player (or multimedia drive, as Western Digital prefers) is the only one that features a massive amount of built-in storage - 2 terabytes to be exact! This humongous storage capacity turns the Elements Play from a mere media player to a veritable digital media library. You can store up to :

• 50 Blu-ray movies
• 200 compressed Blu-ray movies (averaging 10 GB in size)
• 500 DVD movies
• 3,333 Video CD movies
• 110,000 uncompressed RAW pictures (12 megapixels)
• 300,000 compressed JPEG pictures (12 megapixels)
• 85,000 FLAC songs
• 500,000 MP3 songs

Of course, you can accomplish the same thing by attaching a 2 TB external hard disk drive to any media player, but the WD Elements Play conveniently packages it all in a single media player. As a bonus, this media player (and its integrated hard disk drive) comes with an excellent 3-year warranty (2 years in Europe), as well as 30 days of free telephone support!

We like the availability of a USB 2.0 port on the right side of the WD Elements Play. It allows you to attach another external hard disk drive for added storage, or just to transfer more files to the internal hard disk drive. It even allows you to connect and directly play files from a digital camera or camcorder!

We also like the fact that it starts up real quick, and runs really cool. It also has a very intuitive graphics user interface (GUI), which is easy to pick up even without reading the manual. Western Digital even made firmware upgrade super easy by automatically detecting a new firmware in an inserted external USB drive. This is a very important feature because the original 1.00.85 firmware is pretty buggy. Fortunately, upgrading to the 1.01.10 firmware was a piece of cake and it instantly solved many of the bugs we encountered.

The WD Elements Play also supports the new HDMI 1.4 standard, which allows for 4K x 2K resolutions and several stereoscopic 3D formats. These additional features are currently not supported by the WD Elements Play but it offers the possibility of a future firmware upgrade to enable these features.

The Bad

The WD Elements Play's biggest flaw is its lack of support for DTS decoding. This automatically turns all movies with DTS audio encoding into silent movies. If you have a lot of movies that feature DTS audio encoding, then this is the wrong media player for you. The Elements Play also does not support the 12-bit Deep Color mode that is available in the WD TV Live series of media players.

Its rather sluggish performance is also of some concern to us because it can make navigating and playing the list of folders and files rather tedious. Its integrated hard disk drive should have allowed it to perform much better than media players that are bottlenecked by the slower USB connection to their external drives. Hopefully, Western Digital will release a firmware update to fix this problem.

We also dislike its terribly slow USB connection for file transfers between the Elements Play and the PC or Mac. Western Digital should have added a second faster option - either USB 3.0, FireWire or eSATA. Faster connection options aside, they need to do something about the Element Play's USB 2.0 throughput - it's tediously slow compared to other external USB drives.

The Ugly

We have to point out that while it's convenient to have all your files stored inside the Elements Play, it requires you to regularly disconnect the player and its power adaptor from your TV console and set up the player right next to your PC/Mac to transfer new media files. Sure, you can import files using external USB drives but it isn't as convenient as transferring directly from the PC/Mac. This inconvenience is made a little more difficult by the Element Play's short USB cable.

We are a little disappointed that Western Digital decided to do away with component video output and only provide the inferior composite video output. This won't be a problem for those who have HD TVs - you would be using the HDMI port, but those still using good old-fashioned CRT TVs would lose out on the better video quality that component video output could have provided.

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