Despite disappointing sales and no release date for Europe, Sony’s PSX home media centre – a unit consisting of a home media centre, a PVR, and a PS2 – has had a couple of new models added to the range.
The DESR-5100 has a 160mb hard drive, the DESR-7100 has a 250mb drive. Both look the same as the original PSX, though there will be a limited edition silver 5100.
Scheduled for release on July 1, the main enhancements are related to the PSX’s DVD recording features – users can now manually set the bit rate for recording, meaning that longer movies can fit on a disk. There are also 50 templates for creating DVD menus, along with much-demanded DVD+RW/DVD-RW compatibility.
Online PS2 capability has been improved ever so slightly – you can now browse the Central Station bulletin board – but that’s it. No online Twisted Metal Black for PSX owners then. If you have one of the older PSXs, a firmware upgrade coming along on the 15th will add all of the new features, minus the disk upgrades of course.
The units are expected to sell for about 74,000 and 95,000 yen respectively (€562 and €722), but there is still no release for Europe and the US.
Sony Style
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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