Sony Vaio LV180J

[ Music ] ^M00:00:03 >> Hi. I'm Rich Brown, senior editor for CNET.com. Today we're gonna take a look at the Sony Vaio LV180J. There's a lot of large screen all-in-one PCs out right now, but Sony's is actually one of our favorites. So as you can see, this all in one PC has a pretty large screen. It's 24 inches. It makes it really well suited to a home entertainment PC. And of course, like the others, this one comes with a Blu-Ray player. But the amount of extras that Sony had thrown into this system gives it a lot of versatility. You really can integrate it pretty seamlessly with your other living room components. So here you can see two of the features we like best about this system. One is the basic compatible wall mount bracket. No other all-in-one has this, and frankly we don't understand because there are so many that pitch themselves as kind of living room friendly PCs, but Sony's is really the only one that let's you mount this on a wall, on a separate arm. Gets you free of this very PC desktop-like stand here. Now, another feature that's completely unique to this system is an HDMI input. So what that gets you is actually a really great way to integrate this system with your other components. So to show this all off, what we've actually done is we've taken a DV camera, connected it via HDMI to the Sony. Get our video going. See the Windows screen here. You press the HDMI input button, and it gets your video up on screen as easy as that. It's perfect for cameras, game consoles, pretty much any other device that has an HDMI output. There's a button dedicated just for screen power. That's pretty handy. And at the side here, you get a PC express card input. This is a notebook style expansion slot, let's you, you know, add a little bit more functionality to the system if you want, say, an extra FireWire port, or some other kind of feature that this system doesn't have. There's TV input, plenty of USB inputs, as well as a webcam here up top. Now, as an actual computer, this system does have a pretty fast dual core CPU that makes it good for, kind of, single task media editing, like if you're gonna convert a bunch of MP3s. Less so, you know, full on multi-tasking where you're sitting down, and you have a lot of windows open at once throughout the course of a work day. It does have 64-bit Vista, which definitely helps its performance, especially since it has four gigs of RAM. So I'm Rich Brown. This is the Sony Vaio LV180J. ^M00:02:03 [ Music ]