Product Reviews

Although the idea of a media centre PC has been around for a number of years, we're still a long way away from everyone having one sat underneath their television. This is in no small part due to the many companies whose vision of a slick Media Centre PC amounts to a TV tuner in a standard PC tower with a copy of Windows XP Media Center Edition installed. Because very few people will put up with a traditional computer whirring away in their lounge, manufacturers need to put in a lot more thought and effort. There are few that can do this successfully, but with its many years of experience in consumer electronics, Sony is one of them.

Its new flagship media centre, the VGX-XL202, is aimed directly at your living room and everything about it has been designed with sofa-based operation in mind. The wireless keyboard has a built-in laptop-style trackpad, as well as numerous shortcut buttons to reduce the need to get up and mess with the main unit. Impressive attention to detail makes the difference here, with clever power management to prolong the keyboard's battery life for as long as possible and an LCD screen showing battery life, so you won't suddenly be left stranded. The keyboard doesn't need line-of-sight to operate it either, although the included infrared remote control handset does.

Round the back of the unit, Sony hasn't gone crazy with the usual PC connectors. You won't find such old-fashioned sockets like serial or parallel ports, with the space dedicated instead to fairly comprehensive home AV connections - RCA analogue audio outputs, as well as optical and coaxial S/PDIF digital connections. The front of the PC is similarly sparse yet practical, with the bottom half of the fascia flipping down to reveal two USB ports and a mini-Firewire connector, plus composite and S-Video inputs -the latter three are useful for camcorders. There's also a multi-format media card reader neatly tucked away, so you won't need to dig the cable for your digital camera.

Back to the future

While the outside of the VGX-XL202 may have the retro charm of a 1980s' video recorder, there's nothing old-fashioned about the inside. For a start, there are two hard disks offering a combined capacity of 500GB, which leaves plenty of room for hundreds of hours of recorded TV programmes. The processor is one of Intel's latest Core 2 Duo chips running at 2.13GHz. Despite being at the lower end of the range, this is still a powerful processor and with 1GB of RAM to back it up, it delivered a hearty 163% in our benchmarks.

Rather than settle for a standard heatsink and noisy fan to cool the processor, there's a much bigger heatsink that allows two fans at the rear of the case to suck warm air out. This is a much quieter arrangement than normal, with the fans only really approaching audible levels if the PC is pushed to its processing limits.

For graphics, Sony has opted for

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a mid-range graphics card from nVidia - the GeForce 7600GTL. Performance is average, but while a score 72% in our Call of Duty 2 benchmark isn't extravagant, the card will run most modern 3D games perfectly well. As it's also cooled using a proprietary heatsink, it would be tricky to upgrade in the future, but only those wanting to run the latest 3D games at high resolutions need worry.

Ready for HDTV

There's an HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) output for connection to an HDTV, although only the very latest TV's will have such a socket. Thankfully, it's also backwards-compatible with the more common DVI socket using the supplied cable, so most plasma screens, LCD TVs and computer monitors will be fine. A word of warning, though - you'll need to ensure that any display you hook up to the VGX-XL202's digital outputs (whether by HDMI or DVI) is HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) compatible. If not, protected HD content won't play, thanks to anti-piracy measures built into the PC. There's also component video out, but no VGA or SCART, making the PC unsuitable for hooking up to older equipment.

Connecting the VGX-XL202 up to an old CRT TV would be a waste though, as this PC is all about high-definition. To that end, it's no surprise to see Sony's next-generation optical disc format - Blu-ray - installed. This is Sony's attempt at the potential successor to DVD, able to store several times as much data and provide superb quality video. Infuriatingly though, it's far from clear whether this, the competitive but incompatible HD-DVD format or indeed, either of them will actually become mainstream. Blu-ray movies have only just been launched and the experience is hardly seamless. The selection is poor and Windows Media Center Edition doesn't directly support them, so you have to use a special version of WinDVD to watch them - and this doesn't work with the MCE remote control.

Blank Blu-ray discs can store up to 50GB of data, making them ideal for archiving recordings that you want to keep, but at £10 a piece they're an expensive option. While the drive also functions as a DVD writer, it's also responsible for a significant chunk of the VGX-XL202's price tag. Prices will inevitably come down (for the both the drives and the blank media), but it currently leaves the XL202 in more-money-than-sense league.

Tune in, turn on

If you're serious enough to buy a PC like this to watch TV on, the single TV tuner on board is a huge disappointment. A single tuner means that you can't watch another channel while recording is in progress and given that inexpensive dual-tuner cards have been available for some time, it's baffling that an £1,800 entertainment PC doesn't include one. You could, of course, fit your own second TV tuner, but you'll need to get it working with the existing hardware and software.

There's a lot of things to like about the XL202 - the specially designed keyboard, the custom cooling job and its minimalist looks, to name but three. But when you're spending this much money, every detail should be perfect. Sadly, until Sony gets around to fitting a second TV tuner in (and the price of Blu-ray comes down), this remains an impressive, but ultimately flawed, concept piece. If you like the look of the VGX-XL202 though, take a look at its stable mate, the VGX-XL201. Again it only comes with a single tuner, has a slightly slower processor, a DVD burner and half as much storage - but it's a much more attractive £999.