October 15, 2005 Sony is moving ahead in leaps and bounds in its development of the Vaio range of computers in its domestic market. It now has multimedia computers specifically designed for handling music, video production and now home multimedia in an elegant and completely painless way. The diversity of the Vaio range through the Type R, Type H, Type V and Type M ranges is astounding. Last year we previewed the Type X after first writing about it here. In its specced-to-the-max form, the Type X will hold 2 terabytes and record eight simultaneous channels of television for three weeks. The Type X goes on sale in Japan later this month, so a new era of home media capability is coming. With thousands of hours of television to watch, you’ll also need assistance to watch it but the video server enables simultaneous playback in multiple locations. So the kids can watch Sesame Street archives in one room, while the Video Station sends Desperate Housewives wirelessly to the teev in another room and you can watch the baseball or a movie on your laptop via the wireless network.
The Type X Video Station will (October 25 to be exact) come in different combinations with four or eight TV tuners and hard disk sizes ranging from 250GB through to 2TB capacity. There are four video recording bitrates to choose from so you don’t fill up the hard drive too quickly: 1.25Mbps (352 x 240), 2.5Mbps (352 x 240), 4Mbps (720 x 480), and 6Mbps (720 x 480).
The VAIO Type X Living VGX-XL70S features 1TB of hard-drive storage. It comes with a wireless keyboard. The VGX-XL70S runs on a Intel Pentium D processor 820 (2.80 GHz) and sports a GeForce 6200 with HDMI interface. This AV PC also has a DVD writer. The Sony VAIO VGX-XV80S features eight tuners and up to 2TB of hard-drive space. There is also a smaller VGX-XV40S with 4 tuners, but also with up to 2TB of storage. Both systems are controllable via a PC connected via the LAN port.
Unfortunately, all the information is in Japanese but if you try Google Language Tools or Worldlingo, you’ll get the gist.
Other interesting resources for the story include I4U, Akihabaranews, and Gizmodo