Hulking Blu-Ray PC flies in from Far East
Team Blu-Ray can count another soldier among its ranks for the war against HD-DVD: Hong Kong firm Amex has announced that this new hi-def recording Me
Team Blu-Ray can count another soldier among its ranks for the war against HD-DVD: Hong Kong firm Amex has announced that this new hi-def recording Media Center will be hitting European shores from next week.
The M505-BDR has been sneakily masquerading as a standalone Blu-Ray recorder, but is actually a fully blown Media Center PC in the vein of Sony’s monstrous RC204.
This shouldn’t stop early adopters from circling around it like hawks and pairing it with HD-ready TVs, since it’ll play Blu-Ray films at the full 1080p, 1920×1080 resolution, and will upscale your old flicks via an HDMI socket. There’s also support for all the old standards of DVD and CD, so you don’t have to incinerate your collection and start again.
As you’d hope from a machine with a price tag of over a grand, it’s a fairly formidable Media Center. There’s 1.5 terabytes of storage, 4GB memory and an Intel Core Duo processor to keep your family business ticking over, plus Amex has stuffed in two digital TV tuners for entertainment.
The cherry on top is built-in Wi-Fi, although the old ‘b’ and ‘g’ standards aren’t capable of streaming hi-def – it’ll strictly be for zapping over photos and standard-def videos from other sources on your network. Don’t worry, that still gets you plenty of tech brownie points.
Amex M505-BDR
Price: £1100 (with free Blu-Ray film)
On sale: September
Contact: Amex
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Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief 
