IFA 2008: Medion announce new home theatre tech

Home cinema, IFA news
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Not content with merely making tonnes of powerful desktop PCs, Medion is trying to muscle in on the tellies and home theatre market with a couple of new devices.

The “MEDION LIFE P17005 LCD TV” is a pretty big telly at 42″, which is why MEDION refers to it using CAPITAL LETTERS. It has everything you’d expect of a modern TV – full HD 1080p support, lots of sockets to plug things into (3 HDMI, VGA, Component, 3 RCA, and various audio jacks etc), and a screen on which you can watch programmes – but interestingly, it also comes with a built in 250GB hard drive, moving us further towards the day when televisions, computers and mobile phones are only distinguishable from each other by the writing on the side of the box. Unusually too, it doesn’t seem to actually have any tuners in it in order to let you actually watch television. For that, it would seem you need the MEDION LIFE X70002.

The X70002 is the impenetrable model name describing the device that will actually put pictures on the screen described above. I don’t know what you’d call this thing, as it’s like a hybrid between an upscaling DVD player, a TV tuner and a desktop computer. It’ll play and record all of the major DVD formats, but it has a built in digital terrestrial (Freeview) and analogue tuner, as well as a 500GB hard disk. More interestingly, it has a USB port on the front and supports DivX and MPEG4 video files, making getting videos you’ve downloaded on to your TV easy.

No word on pricing or availability yet, unfortunately, but with so many acronymns supported, both are probably going to be pretty expensive.

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James O’Malley
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