Renew Outreach Papyrus Solar Audio Bible - They almost got it right
It was about 3 years back that I first heard that Renew Outreach was producing a solar audio Bible that they called the "Papyrus". I always get excited when I see a new potential playback device for Scripture recordings hit the market. The device looked great on paper and it was with much anticipation that I ordered a test unit. Over the past three years I have used a number of these and honestly, they have not lived up to my expectations. Renew Outreach came so close to making a brilliant device, but the few failings are enough to keep me from encouraging their large scale use in our ministry. Let me explain why, but first I want to focus on the good.
Build - The device is built solidly, there is no doubt about that. It feels solid in the hand and appears rugged. The buttons are covered in rubber and have a very sturdy feel. It feels like it could easily take a fall and be more likely to damage your toe than itself. The only build quality issue I have is with the flimsy plastic covers for the USB and SD card slots. They seem to only have about 5 good openings and closings before they eject themselves from the devices. Besides those little flaps, this really is a solid feeling device.
Layout - The device is laid out logically. All buttons on the front seem to do what they are supposed to. You have a play/pause button, skip chapter forward and backward, skip book forward and backward, as well as volume up and down and the on/off button. There is also a small button on the left side of the device that allows you to choose between internal memory and the SD card. On the front you also have 4 small LEDs. There are four which show you the charge on the batter, then another that is the power button, but also indicates when the device is indexing audio and, depending on if it is red or green, whether you are accessing the internal memory or the SD card. The connectors on the side are well labeled and give you enough space to connect without interfering with each other. You have a DC 6v input as well as the slot for the SD card, USB connector and a headphone jack. The only complaint I have in this department is that I find the power button a bit quirky. I work with audio devices every day and it took me a bit of work to figure out exactly how it works. You push the power button once and some of the LEDs will light up. That is merely an indication of the state of the battery. If you let go of the power button at that point, the battery indicator lights will shut off after about 3 seconds and nothing else happens. If you hold the power button down for 4 seconds there will be a brief green flash on the power LED. I am not sure what that brief flash means, but if you let go at that moment, it won't start either. You need to push and hold the on/off button for about 5 seconds until the solid green light comes on. It will then blink a few times as it accesses the audio and then off it will go.
Sound - The sound on the Papyrus is great! The speaker is loud and clear. It uses .wma compression which allows you to have good quality audio files and still fit a lot on the internal memory, or SD card. You can easily fit an entire NT on the internal memory, and if you use an 8Gb SD card, which is the largest it supports(although at the moment Renew Outreach only sells 4Gb models), you can easily fit an entire Bible. While it is loud and clear, I feel like the claim Renew Outreach makes of saying it will be heard by a group of 200 people is not realistic. Maybe in a very quiet room it could happen, but outside in normal conditions or in a normal room with ambient conditions, realistically it could reach 50 to 100 people max.
Battery Life - The battery life of the Papyrus seems to be pretty good. It will play for several hours, depending on the volume level. The problem comes with the use of the solar panel, and is my biggest disappointment with the Papyrus. The Papyrus is advertised as a solar-powered audio Bible, but, from experimenting with several of these devices, the solar panel seems to be more cosmetic than functional. If you run the Papyrus dead and place it out in the sun for the day and expect to have a fully charged audio Bible by the end of the day, you will be disappointing. Even here in the intense African sun, a full days charging will get you less than 1 hour of play time. It seems that you would need to leave it charge in the sun for a week in order to get a full charge. That just doesn't cut it when you are hoping that people will listen to the Scriptures several hours a day. The purpose of having a solar-powered audio Bible is that it can be sent into the rural areas where there is no electricity and serve faithfully. That just doesn't seem a possibility with the Papyrus. If you charge it via the DC power jack, the device works great. It will receive a charge in an hour or two and play for several hours. So, if you are expecting to distribute audio Bibles in areas without electricity, the Papyrus is not for you. It would be great in urban areas, just be sure to order the DC charger.
Loading Audio - Renew Outreach gives you several options to load your audio content on the Papyrus. Each Papyrus comes with a pre-loaded New Testament of your choice. They have access to New Testament recordings in around 650 languages. These will work great out of the box. If you want to load your own content, you have three options. Renew Outreach will do it for you for $1 US per unit as well as a $50 US setup fee(whether you order 1 unit or 1000). This is not a bad option if you are going to be order a number of these units. You can also purchase a loading kit($4.15 US) from Renew Outreach that will include a proprietary USB cable along with a manual that does a pretty good job of laying out the audio content loading process. The USB port on the Papyrus is a proprietary port which means that you need their cable to load it, which should protect the content from being manipulated. The third option for loading your content is to load your audio files on a SD card for insertion into the card slot on the Papyrus. Please take note that while the slot will fit standard SD cards, Renew Outreach has fitted the Papyrus with some kind of card authentication that will only allow the Papyrus to use SD cards purchased from Renew Outreach. This does allow for some content protection since another SD card cannot be inserted, but it doesn't stop someone from changing the content on the original SD card. It's not a bad system and Renew Outreach doesn't try to take you to the cleaners on their SD cards,(4Gb for $8.50 US) you just need to plan ahead and make sure you purchase enough of these before you leave the country.
I want to take a minute also to share about about the experience of loading the Papyrus. The actual process of loading audio seems quite straight forward. The Papyrus uses the standard .wma format files like most windows pc uses every day. I started with .wav files split up by chapter for an entire New Testament. This means I had 260 files in 27 folders representing books. I used Adobe Audition and batch processed the 260 files converting each one to a .wma file. I already had my files named alphabetically, which is what most audio devices use to create the playlist to play in the correct order. I had read the instructions for the loading process and was aware that, for some inexplicable reason, the Papyrus is programmed to set up it's playlist organized by creation date. I personally cannot think of any situation in which that would be useful, but to each their own I guess. Knowing this was the case, I was very careful about what order I created the folders and in what order I process my audio files. Each one was checked and double checked that was in the correct order by creation date. Unfortunately this is where the exercise went awry. Using a Windows 8 Machine I selected all 27 folders and dragged them onto the SD card bound for the Papyrus. I put the SD card in the Papyrus and it was chaos. There was no ryme or reason as to how it played. I took the card back out and put it into the computer again and checked, and sure enough, the computer did not copy them to the SD card in order, thus the files were not playing in order. I erased the card and started again taking the advice of the loading manual by copying each folder individually in the order that they were to play. Tried it again, still chaos. I started over again creating all new folders on the SD card and dragging over each file, all 260 of them, in turn. Again, chaos. I finally took the whole package, zipped it up, dragged it over to the SD card and unzipped it. I checked and double checked each file and they were all sorted correctly by the creation date. I put it in the Papyrus one more time and while it would play each file in the folders in the correct order, it refused to play the folders in the correct order. At this point I was pretty fed up to say the least. I finally put the SD card into a Macbook, took all the files off, recopied them onto the SD card and all was well. It worked in the end, but if I would have had to depend on the Windows machine alone I would probably still be pulling my hair out. The entire indexing by creation date just boggles my mind. Not only does it make it difficult to order things correctly, it renders it nearly impossible to insert new audio onto an SD card except at the end, unless you want to redo the entire message. I see this aspect as being a big drawback to anyone hoping to use the Papyrus to playback their own custom audio messages.
The Cost - The cost of the Papyrus when I write this is $80 US. It looks like there may be discounts for orders of 10 or more, but no details are given. This cost puts it at 2-3 times the cost of some of the other solar recharged audio Bibles.
Conclusion - I may have come across a bit harsh on my evaluation of the Papyrus, but that probably because I had held great hope that Renew Outreach had filled a much needed gap in the solar recharged audio Bible lineup. I was really hoping this would be a great tool to use for rural large group Scripture listening programs. But because of the issues with the solar charging system, it doesn't fit the bill. So, if you are looking for a solidly build audio Bible with the volume for a group up to 100 to place somewhere where there is a power source, the Papyrus may be the answer. If you need something to depend on solar power, this is not for you. Just remember if you do order a Papyrus you better order the DC charger($5.05 US) with it.
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| The Renew Outreach Papyrus |
Layout - The device is laid out logically. All buttons on the front seem to do what they are supposed to. You have a play/pause button, skip chapter forward and backward, skip book forward and backward, as well as volume up and down and the on/off button. There is also a small button on the left side of the device that allows you to choose between internal memory and the SD card. On the front you also have 4 small LEDs. There are four which show you the charge on the batter, then another that is the power button, but also indicates when the device is indexing audio and, depending on if it is red or green, whether you are accessing the internal memory or the SD card. The connectors on the side are well labeled and give you enough space to connect without interfering with each other. You have a DC 6v input as well as the slot for the SD card, USB connector and a headphone jack. The only complaint I have in this department is that I find the power button a bit quirky. I work with audio devices every day and it took me a bit of work to figure out exactly how it works. You push the power button once and some of the LEDs will light up. That is merely an indication of the state of the battery. If you let go of the power button at that point, the battery indicator lights will shut off after about 3 seconds and nothing else happens. If you hold the power button down for 4 seconds there will be a brief green flash on the power LED. I am not sure what that brief flash means, but if you let go at that moment, it won't start either. You need to push and hold the on/off button for about 5 seconds until the solid green light comes on. It will then blink a few times as it accesses the audio and then off it will go.Sound - The sound on the Papyrus is great! The speaker is loud and clear. It uses .wma compression which allows you to have good quality audio files and still fit a lot on the internal memory, or SD card. You can easily fit an entire NT on the internal memory, and if you use an 8Gb SD card, which is the largest it supports(although at the moment Renew Outreach only sells 4Gb models), you can easily fit an entire Bible. While it is loud and clear, I feel like the claim Renew Outreach makes of saying it will be heard by a group of 200 people is not realistic. Maybe in a very quiet room it could happen, but outside in normal conditions or in a normal room with ambient conditions, realistically it could reach 50 to 100 people max.
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| The solar cell on the Papyrus |
Loading Audio - Renew Outreach gives you several options to load your audio content on the Papyrus. Each Papyrus comes with a pre-loaded New Testament of your choice. They have access to New Testament recordings in around 650 languages. These will work great out of the box. If you want to load your own content, you have three options. Renew Outreach will do it for you for $1 US per unit as well as a $50 US setup fee(whether you order 1 unit or 1000). This is not a bad option if you are going to be order a number of these units. You can also purchase a loading kit($4.15 US) from Renew Outreach that will include a proprietary USB cable along with a manual that does a pretty good job of laying out the audio content loading process. The USB port on the Papyrus is a proprietary port which means that you need their cable to load it, which should protect the content from being manipulated. The third option for loading your content is to load your audio files on a SD card for insertion into the card slot on the Papyrus. Please take note that while the slot will fit standard SD cards, Renew Outreach has fitted the Papyrus with some kind of card authentication that will only allow the Papyrus to use SD cards purchased from Renew Outreach. This does allow for some content protection since another SD card cannot be inserted, but it doesn't stop someone from changing the content on the original SD card. It's not a bad system and Renew Outreach doesn't try to take you to the cleaners on their SD cards,(4Gb for $8.50 US) you just need to plan ahead and make sure you purchase enough of these before you leave the country.
I want to take a minute also to share about about the experience of loading the Papyrus. The actual process of loading audio seems quite straight forward. The Papyrus uses the standard .wma format files like most windows pc uses every day. I started with .wav files split up by chapter for an entire New Testament. This means I had 260 files in 27 folders representing books. I used Adobe Audition and batch processed the 260 files converting each one to a .wma file. I already had my files named alphabetically, which is what most audio devices use to create the playlist to play in the correct order. I had read the instructions for the loading process and was aware that, for some inexplicable reason, the Papyrus is programmed to set up it's playlist organized by creation date. I personally cannot think of any situation in which that would be useful, but to each their own I guess. Knowing this was the case, I was very careful about what order I created the folders and in what order I process my audio files. Each one was checked and double checked that was in the correct order by creation date. Unfortunately this is where the exercise went awry. Using a Windows 8 Machine I selected all 27 folders and dragged them onto the SD card bound for the Papyrus. I put the SD card in the Papyrus and it was chaos. There was no ryme or reason as to how it played. I took the card back out and put it into the computer again and checked, and sure enough, the computer did not copy them to the SD card in order, thus the files were not playing in order. I erased the card and started again taking the advice of the loading manual by copying each folder individually in the order that they were to play. Tried it again, still chaos. I started over again creating all new folders on the SD card and dragging over each file, all 260 of them, in turn. Again, chaos. I finally took the whole package, zipped it up, dragged it over to the SD card and unzipped it. I checked and double checked each file and they were all sorted correctly by the creation date. I put it in the Papyrus one more time and while it would play each file in the folders in the correct order, it refused to play the folders in the correct order. At this point I was pretty fed up to say the least. I finally put the SD card into a Macbook, took all the files off, recopied them onto the SD card and all was well. It worked in the end, but if I would have had to depend on the Windows machine alone I would probably still be pulling my hair out. The entire indexing by creation date just boggles my mind. Not only does it make it difficult to order things correctly, it renders it nearly impossible to insert new audio onto an SD card except at the end, unless you want to redo the entire message. I see this aspect as being a big drawback to anyone hoping to use the Papyrus to playback their own custom audio messages.
The Cost - The cost of the Papyrus when I write this is $80 US. It looks like there may be discounts for orders of 10 or more, but no details are given. This cost puts it at 2-3 times the cost of some of the other solar recharged audio Bibles.
Conclusion - I may have come across a bit harsh on my evaluation of the Papyrus, but that probably because I had held great hope that Renew Outreach had filled a much needed gap in the solar recharged audio Bible lineup. I was really hoping this would be a great tool to use for rural large group Scripture listening programs. But because of the issues with the solar charging system, it doesn't fit the bill. So, if you are looking for a solidly build audio Bible with the volume for a group up to 100 to place somewhere where there is a power source, the Papyrus may be the answer. If you need something to depend on solar power, this is not for you. Just remember if you do order a Papyrus you better order the DC charger($5.05 US) with it.
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