It’s time to take that old drawer full of VHS tapes out back and give it the proper burial it deserves. Analog is dead. But while the VCR’s successor, the DVR, offers a quick way to record media, one thing it doesn’t offer is much in the way of long term, archival storage. Great for taping last night’s episode of Lost, not so great for keeping baby’s first steps. And with the explosion of high-def media, anything that’s going to store it for a while is going to need a lot of storage. Fortunately, Sony’s got it covered with its latest entertainment system.
The Sony HES-V1000 Home Entertainment Server is a library in a box. With a 500GB hard drive, plus room for over 200 Blu-ray discs in its built-in changer, the unit’s capacity borders on absurdity. The hard drive alone can handle 137 hours of video, 40,000 songs or 20,000 digital photos. A full load of 25GB single-layer Blu-ray discs would represent an additional 5TB in digital storage – 10TB if they were dual layer. Simply put, if the HES-V1000 can’t hold your entire media collection in one form or another, you have a problem.
Images Courtesy of Sony
Perhaps what’s more important than all that space is the way that the HES-V1000 can put it to use. A built-in Blu-ray burner means all those carousel spots can be filled with discs of a buyer’s own invention, not just commercial movie releases. One major hitch: buyers will have to find their own ways of scrounging up content to burn, since the HES-V1000 doesn’t actually have an HD receiver or the means to capture HD content.
Sony clearly went out of its way to make the HES-V1000 compact, but with a 200-disc changer there’s only so much shrinking you can do. Its two-and-a-half-foot-tall tower profile could be more difficult to accommodate than traditional horizontally oriented home theater components like receivers and VCRs. But on the plus side, its mirror-black finish should fit in fine the other modern A/V equipment that it will most likely keep company with.
All the content you can pack into one unit is worthless if it takes five minutes of navigating to access it. Fortunately, Sony has included its XrossMediaBar for keeping everything organized – the same system that collected a Technical Emmy award when Sony introduced it on the PlayStation 3. And to avoid the agony of individually programming in titles for 200 movies, it can also hook up to the Internet via an included LAN port and pull movie metadata from the Web.
Sony devotees will be happy to know that the HES-V1000 support’s Sony’s Digital Living Network Alliance wireless standard, so it plays nice with other Sony products. It can stream up to four independent audio streams simultaneously this way, in case you’re feeling spendy and need different music in every room of your house. More importantly, it can link up with PlayStation 3 consoles and select Vaio laptops, both of which could benefit from tapping into the unit’s vast storage to play movies, music and browse photos.
At $3,500, the Sony HES-V1000 certainly couldn’t be called cheap, but for what it offers there aren’t too many systems that can compete with it. Many other home theater PC products – such as Alienware’s Hangar18, offer similar storage capacities, but Sony’s unit stands alone with its unique Blu-ray disc changer. For the media hound and Blu-ray devotee, Sony’s HEV-V1000 makes a lot of sense. Find out more about the Sony HES-V1000 Home Entertainment Server from Sony’s website.
