January 4, 2008

LaCie LaCinema Premmier USB HDD Media Streamer

LaCie has been making great external hard drives for a long time now and have always produced quality products. It looks like they got tired of just making storage hard drives and have decided to add another media streaming hard drive to the market.

The great thing about getting one of these media streaming hard drives these days is the storage capacity. The LaCinema comes in 3 different sizes( 500GB, 750GB, 1TB ). With the size of movies being around 4GB and up this will allow you to store a lot of movies on one of these suckers. There are hook ups in the back to output in Component, Composite and S-Video. No HDMI for you HDTV HDMI freaks, but it does have 1080i upscaling so you do have that. It can output audio over Optical and Coax.
The LaCinema supports a decent amount of formats for viewing your media. This list isn't as full featured as we would have liked, but I don't think they were going for the high end media streaming crowd. This seems more aimed at your average user that just wants experience their media on the TV. They have covered most of the popular formats so most of you should be fine.

MPEG1/2/4
ISO
IFO
VOB
MP3
WMA
AC3
OGG
JPEG
BMP
TIF
PNG

The only thing that we can see wrong with this device is that there is no network connection. You will need to keep moving this back and forth between your media center and your computer in order to transfer new files to it. So it isn't the end of be all of media streamers, but it does get the job done and it can also be taken with you so you can bring your entire media library to your friends house and play it there. Seems like it would be great for taking on vacations.

The low end version is $299 while the 1TB unit will set you back $648.