What you won’t find is are SCART or DVI ports. Round the back there’s a healthy amount of connectivity including HDMI. The wireless keyboard and the remote control don’t need line of sight to operate, which is good and the receiver is built-in to the chassis – so there’s no need to use an awkward external USB dongle. There are shortcut buttons for email, browser, and launching Media Center and volume controls too. The keys are quite firm and the typing action was solid.
There’s also a power switch for the keyboard so you can conserve the batteries when you’re not using the system. The keyboard is powered by four AA batteries, which is quite a lot but there’s an LCD which indicats the power remaining so you shouldn’t be caught short. That said, as a left hander I found it difficult to use, as for me it was on the wrong side (it was fine for everyone else though – ed.).
SONY MEDIACENTER WINDOWS
The keyboard integrates a trackpad on the right hand side, which makes it possible to get round Windows from a distance. On the far right of the front flap you’ll find a Connect button for connecting the wireless keyboard.
SONY MEDIACENTER FULL SIZE
I was looking for somewhere to plug in my own iPod headphones and was unable to find a socket – time to dig out that mini-jack to full size adapter I guess. There’s a mini-jack style microphone connector and hinting at its true AV credentials, a full size headphone socket. You’ll also find two USB 2.0 ports, a four-pin FireWire 400 port, and composite and S-Video inputs along with stereo phono inputs. Underneath that front flap you’ll find a card reader catering for all major formats, including CompactFlash. The Blu-ray drive is slot loading and will suck in the discs as soon as you start to feed them into it. Of course, the serious home cinema buff will probably have their kit housed in a custom made cupboard but you might very well want to leave this Sony on display – at least once you’ve taken off the various stickers that adorn the front. This discreet approach is just what’s required – you don’t want lots of naff lights ruining the ambiance when you’re watching a film. There’s a power button on the top left of the black and silver fascia with small lights under the surface that indicate power, hard disk activity and wireless connectivity. The sides are made of long silver slats that look good and also let heat escape from the interior. The large silver flap at the front opens and closes with a satisfying click and rather than just flopping down, while the hinges have some resistance so that it lowers itself slowly. A large luxurious looking Vaio logo is etched in silver across the expansive lid. It is quite high and very deep too, but that’s something that the more hardcore AV enthusiast will rather like – it looks like they’re getting a lot for their money. I’d go as far as saying that’s it’s the best looking Media Center System I’ve seen.
The Sony Vaio VGX-XL202 passes with flying colours.
SONY MEDIACENTER PC
If the average person walks into the room and can tell that it’s a PC under the TV, then the unit has failed. One of the first hurdles that a Media Center system has to get over is the living room test. This is essentially the same as the VGX-XL201 but with the addition of twice the hard disc capacity, a slightly faster CPU and the Blu-ray drive, for which you’ll pay an extra £800 – a hefty additional sum.īefore we focus on the Blu-ray drive, we should look at the system as a whole. We’ve already looked at the impressive Vaio VGN-AR21S notebook that features an integrated Blu-ray drive and now Sony has put another Blu-ray notebook drive into it’s latest desktop Media Center system – the VGX-XL202. Sony is not ignoring the launch of its own format however. The format is most closely associated with Sony, but the first dedicated drive is actually available from Samsung. This week sees the release of Blu-ray, the first of the next generation high definition optical discs formats to hit the UK.
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