New Technology TV

The world of digital home entertainment has a dizzying array of new products. There are at least fifty separate companies building LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) televisions and that is just one type of the four or five different technologies currently in the marketplace of High Definition televisions (HDTV). There are TiVo-type DVR’s (Digital Video Recorders) that are replacing VCR’s and DVD recorders. And the new HD (High Definition) DVD recorders are hitting the stores. In a noble attempt to bring disparate devices together, HP has a feature-rich, state-of-the-art device they call Digital Entertainment Center. Costing a bit over two thousand dollars, this device looks like a mysterious black box with hidden controls or perhaps resembles two thin DVD players stacked on top of each other. It is a svelte four inches high and 17 inches square, and is designed to be stacked on a shelf. It generates so much heat that it has to have open space on at least three different sides.

This new machine performs a multiplicity of tasks. It records live television, even in High Definition (over the air), and plays DVD’s (but not in Hi-Def). It has a comprehensive electronic programming guide that is free; you just need to be hooked up to the Internet. It would be extremely useful since it can tell fourteen days out, what is coming on. It has dual NTSC tuners and one ATSC tuner to receive High Definition over the air. Its excellent video processor is the powerful, 128 MB DDR Memory chip called the GeForce 6600. While some high-end laptops have 6 in one card readers, this has a 9 in 1 reader! In addition, it has a built-in WiFi LAN adaptor, for wireless computing in your home. It is designed to organize and store your photos, digital music, and video and connect to the web.

With a 300 GB hard disk to store things on, it should hold the household’s digital content for a time, but with even small businesses already needing storage measured in Terabytes, I wonder if 300 GB is really enough. (One GB = 1 Billion bytes, although the actual capacity available is somewhat less). The high capacity hard drive internal hard drive is very fast—7200 rpm. It does have a removable 300 GB Personal Media Drive for more storage and portability. To run all of this, it features Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition running on an Intel Pentium 4 Processor. It also includes another great feature, the LightScribe Double Layer Super Multi DVD+/-RW/R drive, that is probably the best burner on the mass market, in that it does what all the others do, plus it enables the user to label their newly minted discs with custom grayscale images like black and white photos. At over two grand, certainly more affordable products duplicate many of the same capabilities. I expect subsequent models to be somewhat easier to setup and use.