LaCie Silverscreen

Price: £164
Overall rating: **** (4 out of 5)
Manufacturer: LaCie
Technical specifications
silverscreen 40 GB USB... £162.00
Lacie's Silverscreen is a portable hard disk with a difference. As well as being an ultra-quiet external USB drive, it can play media files directly to a television. The 40GB version holds about 40 DivX movies, 10,000 songs or 40,000 pictures.

The drive comes pre-formatted with the Fat32 file system and getting your data
onto it is as easy as dragging files into pre-defined folders. You can then entertain family and friends by hooking up the drive to a TV and selecting the file you want to play from an on-screen menu using the supplied remote control.

The Silverscreen is one of the first devices we've seen with an HDMI connector, which can output composite, S-video and component video together with audio. It can also output HDTV signals at up to 1080i. Only composite and S-video leads are supplied, but you do get a Scart adapter. There's also a digital audio output.

While the remote is sluggish, playback quality is good and the drive can handle a range of Mpeg1, 2 and 4-based files, include video-on-demand files from DivX.com. Audio support includes mp3, wav, wma and aac. However, a major let-down is that the Silverscreen can't play Quicktime or wmv files and doesn't support Apple's version of aac used in Itunes. There's also a lack of any accompanying software; except for a freeware backup utility for Macs, all you get is a pdf of the manual. A utility for ripping DVDs or converting video between formats would have been an obvious choice.

The Silverscreen is incredibly easy to use but is let down by a few niggling omissions. However, once these are sorted out, this will certainly be a five-star product.