Japan gets another cool Media Center
Japan gets another cool Media Center
Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications.
"Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials
- Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
It's the oldest cliché in the book: all the good gear comes out in Japan first. Check out this new HDC-7 Media Center PC from Onkyo. It's a Viiv system (and if you don't know what that is by now, here's some remedial reading for you), and it has a groovy gold/bronze finish--a welcome change from the usual silver or black we always see in rack-style PCs.
The real interesting part is the back panel, which sports enough A/V connections to stand toe-to-toe with a good high-end home-theater receiver. You have discrete 7.1 surround-sound audio outs (plus optical audio outs), and video outputs, including component, DVI, S-Video and the Japanese D4 video connector (a kind of analog HD connection). In U.S. dollars, it'd run about $2,500, not that you're likely to see it on these shores anytime soon.
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