How it looks?
What makes black the chosen choice of color for most electronic gadget manufacturers is its capability to merge into any room's aesthetics. With LaCie, they've not just kept things black, but extremely black with not a clue of color. The reason for this is because when you power this cutie up, you'll see a saturated blue glow radiating from the centre-bottom of the front panel. If you look at it from a few steps back, it almost looks like this is floating on that light. There are no buttons on this cube, completely hiding its function in your living room. However, if you were to look at the back panel, the connectivity options are revealed.What actually LaCinema does?
LaCinema isn't just a media server that plays back files off an internal hard disk. It in fact can record an input signal, preferably a cable television signal, onto its hard disk for later viewing. Plus, it's one of the few media servers that come with an internal hard disk, a whopping 1TB one! Needless to say this boosts the hell out of its price but it does save you the trip to the computer store.Record your favorite TV shows
You can hook up your cable television connection to the aerial port in the back and let the inbuilt TV tuner card of the LaCinema do the rest for you. Once the server has picked up the channels, you can hit record and capture the currently viewed channel to the hard disk. You cannot, however, record one channel while viewing the other as that would require two inbuilt tuners which would again boost the Rs 35.000 price-tag this baby sports to a new dimension.
Video formats that LaCinema can play
The LaCinema can playback pretty much everything you stream through it. from 1080p HD video to DivX off your USB pen-drive. What's more, you can even transfer whatever it is that you've recorded off your cable channels to a pen-drive for portability. Via its wireless or Ethernet port, you can stream all your movies/pictures/music from your PC or any other LAN connected device. Otherwise, the LaCinema comes with the standard HDMI out. USB pair of inputs and composite/component outputs along with an S-Video input.
Remote control of LaCinema is not up to the mark
The controller has been designed to keep the buttons to a bare minimum which makes controlling the LaCinema more of a combined affair where you need to navigate using the user interface and the remote. And to make things even harder, the LaCinema is extremely unresponsive to it. You have to really struggle with pointing the controller right at the black box and waiting a good 2 seconds before you get even the faintest of responses. At this price range, this is unacceptable.
User review of LaCinema
It has a really long boot-up time. Once the menu came, you will like the way it looked with dark-grey as its color theme. The icons are large and easy to navigate through, if you can get the remote to function properly.
. The server doesn’t take too much time in getting the video to our television, and once it reached, the picture is exceptional. There is nothing to complain about, be it in the audio department or the video. The colors were spot on, with exquisite sharpness and well balanced stereo soundstage.
1080p version category, LaCinema read the file as fast as it had read the short film. The picture is again, very great with all the 1080p clarity you could've asked for. When you attach USB pen-drive to the LaCinema, it immediately recognizes it and the pen-drive popped up as an extra folder in the 'Home' menu.
While you play the DivX version, you can see the upscaler doing its work to get the low quality of the video up to 1080i, and will give you a crystal clear image.
The LaCinema is very expensive for a media server even with the 1TB harddlsk it comes with and its television recording capabilities. Its video and audio playback is absolutely fabulous. Bad remote and price at the higher side, need to be considered while buying.
