LaCie Silverscreen Portable Multimedia Hard Drive
http://www.lacie.com/products
/product.htm?pid=10480
If
you've ever listened to the show before, you know that the HT Guys are
always looking for new ways to make our home theater experience more
portable. The trend is growing, iPods are more popular on college
campuses than beer and portable DVD players are a hot ticket online and
in stores. This week we'll take a look at the LaCie
Silverscreen
Portable Multimedia Hard Drive. So what exactly is it? It's a tiny
USB hard drive that has A/V outputs so you can watch movies, listen to
music and show pictures on any TV anywhere. Available in 40 GB and 80
GB capacities, it supports playback of MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI, VOB, ISO)
and MPEG 4 (AVI, DivX®, XviD) video files; MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC (without
DRM), and AC3 audio files and JPEG images.
First off you notice that it's built very sturdy, and it looks
cool. We didn't try it, but it seems like it could take some impact if
it had to. You won't need to worry about it if you plan on using it to
lug your movie collection around, it will hold up just fine. The
connection options are minimal, but it includes all the cables you need
to make it work. The remote control that comes with it works as it's
supposed to, but it's definitely not the better part of this setup.
It's tough to read and somewhat old-school. It will do the job, but
doesn't get a great review in form or function from us.
On to functionality. It draws its power from the USB
connection when it's plugged in to the computer, which is very
convenient. No need for a separate power cable. The drive also
includes a special USB plug that allows you to split a USB connection
in two, so you can have the
Silverscreen
connected without sacrificing one of your USB plugs. Copy times are
less than stellar. It seemed to take almost as long to copy a file
from my desktop to the drive as it did to download the file. But my
Internet connection is really fast, so it wasn't a bad experience at
all. The drive comes with four pre-defined folders, Firmware, for
upgrading the hard drive, Movies, Music and Pictures. You can add an
autoMusic folder to get background music for a picture slide show.
Once all your videos have been transferred to the Silverscreen,
it's off to the TV to watch them. The drive has outputs for Composite,
S-video and component video, as well as Stereo and Digital audio, so it
will play back anything you can throw at it. The coolest thing? It's
High Def! It can be set to scale content to 720p or 1080i, so you can
get every ounce of pleasure out of your big, expensive HDTV. It
doesn't support DivX HD yet, but hopefully a firmware upgrade will be
available soon to remedy that problem. Using the drive is a snap. The
menu system is easy and playback is a no brainer. Unfortunately, the
drive doesn't have any kind of display built in to it, so you have to
have it connected to a TV to use it. Which means you can't use it for
pure audio playback in the car, and you need to be able to see the
screen for car video playback. LaCie sells a car power adapter for
$24.99.
Overall it's an easy way to take your multimedia collection
anywhere, and makes it easy to watch or listen to it. At 40 or 80 GB,
you won't be able to store a ton ov MPEG-2 DVD backups, but using
MPEG-4, you should be able to reduce how many DVD wallets you carry
around with you.
Street Price, 40 GB: $180.00
