Sony Blu-ray Media Center 122
An anonymous reader writes "Sony announced its Blu-ray equipped VGX-XL202 media center box a while back and a full review has finally appeared. This looks like it could be the ultimate media center PC with a Blu-ray re-writer, HDMI and HDCP enabled NVidia graphics, integrated wireless, gigabit ethernet, digital TV tuner and twin hard disks. Unfortunately it doesn't come cheap."
Die in a fire (Score:2, Insightful)
The most important part of the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange type of review (Score:5, Insightful)
- The extremely high price, yes, we can set that to one side for "new" technology.
- Then you have the "No output at all without HDCP" problem (although early adopters should know this already)
- Then you have the software problems related to Blu-Ray which stop you using the built-in software that plays EVERYTHING else (and only Vista will support Blu-Ray properly, it seems).
- Then the right-handed-only keyboard/mouse combo (instantly denying comfortable use by a fair percentage of the population)
- Then the spurious errors and crashes
- The Keyboard's high power usage (4AA's)
- No SCART/DVI-I ports *at all*
- Single TV Tuner preventing simultaneous viewing/recording
- Frame-rate issues (Possibly the most worrying problem)
- Possible minor quality issues on the playback
But yet the summary of the article is almost 100% positive about it.
8 out of 10? Sounds more like 2 out of 10 to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got to be kidding me. Keep in mind while you read this that this device costs around $3,360 USD.
If this thing gets an overall 8 out of 10, I can't help but wonder how a device can possibly get dinged for less. I mean, really, from TFA:
So your fancy expensive toy won't let you watch your movies.
All that money, and it stores less than one of my desktop's hard drives
Ooh, around $150 worth of software, which they've undoubtedly OEMed for probably less than $20.
So you can only record one television station at a time. I hope you don't have two favorite shows that happen to come on back-to-back, or you're just SOL. Even my five-year-old TiVo has dual tuners, and it's not you can't get a dual-tuner component [amazon.com] for less than $70.
This extra bit of complication brought to you courtesy of the letters D, R, and M.
Oh, so to play our movies, we'll have to actually upgrade to Vista when it comes out. Good, because it's not like you've already spent enough to buy the box itself, right? And I'm sorry, I'm not going to use a frickin' keyboard to play a frickin' movie from my frickin' DVD player on my frickin' tv.
Yet more hoops to jump through to play a movie, again brought to you by the letters D, R, and M.
Oh, now we see why it earned an 8 out of 10! Oh, wait, those are bad things, aren't they? Well, all of that is worth it if we get image quality that knocks our socks off, so let's get to the bottom line:
Doesn't jive... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but HDMI and HDCP enabled and ultimate media center just don't go together in the same sentence.
Any media center PC that's designed to keep me from recording the TV shows I'm receiving does not qualify as ultimate
Re:Strange type of review (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The most important part of the article... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Friends dont let friends buy Sony (Score:3, Insightful)