RSSIomega surges ahead with a half-terabyte home theater drive
By Michael Hatamoto | Published April 23, 2008, 6:32 PM
On its way to becoming an EMC division, Iomega today announced its new 500 GB ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive, designed to let users watch entertainment content on their TVs and home theater systems without the need of a PC.
The ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive measures 7.7" x 2.3" x 5" and weights two pounds, which is the equivalent of a regular-sized paperback book. The USB 2.0-powered drive is a 3.5-inch 7200 rpm hard drive connectable to PCs using Microsoft Windows 2000, XP or Vista.
But it doesn't have to stay connected there. After plugging the HD into a TV using HDMI or component video outputs, users can navigate through video, music, and photo content using the Iomega remote and navigation system through the TV. Iomega allows video playback through the hard drive at 480i, 480p, 720p, or 1080 resolution.
According to Iomega, 500 GB of HD storage can store up to 2 million photos, 750 hours of video, or 9,250 hours of music, in MP3, AC3, WAV, WMA, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and JPEG content formats.
The ScreenPlay is now available in North America with a $209.95 MSRP. Iomega plans to release the drive to the international market late next month for €179.99 (~$286).
External hard drives are becoming more popular as price per gigabyte continues to drop and storage capacities increase. Western Digital's My DVR Expander hard drive is an example of an Iomega competitor, with a retail price of $199.99; it allows users to directly record up to 60 hours of TV content through an eSATA cable.
After EMC announced two weeks ago it would purchase Iomega, it is not likely the acquisition will immediately impact Iomega's chosen components manufacturers. Once the deal is completed before the start of the third quarter, barring legal complications, Iomega may continue to choose its own suppliers.
Ooooh 500MB (I meant GB). Thats like touting 512MB memory cards. They obviously have a crapload of these drives laying around that they need to move.
So let me get this straight. My notebook has 4 times the storage space of this drive in it's RAM slot? Pathetic. I've always hated Iomega and thier overpriced crap.
Remember when 100MB Zip discs were $30 each. Then the CD-R came along and crushed these losers.
That thing looks like a cheap cable modem on top of it.
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|500GB...
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|500MB.
Would now be a good time to tell you to REREAD that article and duct tape your mouth shut from the impending explosion?
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|You all know what I meant. I'm not a high detail personality according to the test I recently took. The test also says I can be very disruptive if provoked. Big surprise.
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|This was not announced yesterday. It was announced about 2 weeks ago. I know because I bought the thing the day it was available.
It works great. It plays everything I have thrown at it yet, including raw DVD rips (VOB).
Picture quality is outstanding, in HDMI and Component (I did not try composite)
preinterpost, it might not be the streaming device you like, but I got it for one reason, to get my piles of DVDs into storage. I have over 60 DVDs ripped to it now and alot more space.
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|romp11 do you have a DVD ripper program you can recommend? Either storebought or homemade (from full size DVD recorder or DVDcamcorder) or both? I've just now started looking and you sound satisfied - which is what I want to be :-)
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|Was excited about similar proprietary products years ago but vendors don't update firmware and it just doesn't work as advertised. 1/2 TB is the smallest size for a media drive these days. IMHO this thing is dead on arrival. Now and the future belongs to streaming devices where the player is decoupled from the server (at home or remote).
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|But where is the dang FLAC and Vorbis support?!
These codecs are free. FREE. Ugh. You offer us high storage capacity and then don't support the formats that are actually going to give us better quality by taking advantage of it. And is this device actually DivX Certified, or by "MPEG-4" do you mean "cross your fingers"?
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|I'm sold!
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