Thread: Lacie LaCinema Premier 500 GB HARD DRIVE

Multimedia hard disks are new, dynamic and useful companions for people who love to take their data with them. They have added benefits other than just storage because they let users not only store data but also play media straight off the hard disk. In today's world, portability and versatility are key features which have to be taken into consideration when buying any kind of new hardware. In this dynamically changing sector, Lacie has been consistently churning out hard disk drives which are beautiful and still very efficient. They have now extended their efforts to create great hard disks by launching the LaCinema Premier 500 GB hard disk and getting more involved in multimedia hard disks. The hard disk promised a lot and we were on hand to see if it could deliver on all the high standards that it claims to set.

FEATURES: Lacie has created this drive to be a sensible replacement to your DVD player and so it plays a wide array of file types. It can play standard audio and video file types such as AVI, DVD-video, MP3, WMA and some others as well as display photos file types such as JPEG, PNG, BMP and GIF. The most important features for this drive have to be the various outputs it is compatible with. The drive
can be connected with composite video, S-Video, HD component video and thus can be used on almost all TVs, making it very versatile. Another interesting feature that needs to be taken into consideration is that while the drive does not support HDMI, it does take into account HD scaling if used in HD component video.



PERFORMANCE: After connecting the drive to an LCD TV, we wanted to see how the interface and the remote would work because in order to make maximum use of the experience. We found that although, the user interface was charming and well organized. The remote is quite big, but has a lot of buttons so you really shouldn't have to leave your chair, sadly, that was not the case. The remote just would not respond well from time to time and it was very frustrating to constantly figure why that was the case.

Every time we played a file when we enterep the menu, especially if it was a qig file such as DV.D movie files, the return button which took us to the top menu stopped responding or would react very belatedly. This meant we had to get up and go to the drive in order to hit the main menu there. While the drive has HD component output we felt it would have been nicer to get an HDMI output. Other than that the user interface was great to use and the drive played all files besides a few DivX files. The quality of video was excellent and the player responded very well to fast forwarding and rewinding and not skipping frames.

VERDICT: This is a really lovely little gadget to have. It has everything you want if you need portable storage as well as a portable media player. The biggest stumbling block however is the painful price tag.
FOR: Huge array of features, storage space and great looks.
AGAINST: Very Expensive, remote control inconsistencies.