LaCie brings hard-drive functionality to the living room. Check out the new LaCie LaCinema Black series and LaCinema Classic Bridge here.
In the past, CDs took care of music, VHS tapes covered movies, Rite Aid was our Photoshop and the home computer was a loading dock for all other miscellaneous forms of multimedia such as games and word files, but the digital media phenomenon is snowballing at an inevitably rapid rate. Today, most of our media bits and bytes are tossed onto our laptops or external hard drives and viewed on computer monitors. Even the DVD's days are numbered. The magic of the living room movie night is slowly dwindling, but LaCie is making a valiant attempt to keep the fire alive with the LaCie LaCinema Black series and LaCinema Classic Bridge external media applications through a concoction of style and versatility.
 First we'll start with the LaCie LaCinema Black Play and the LaCie Lacinema Black Record. Both mass storage devices not only hold a 500GB minimum of digital content such as movies, music and pictures, but they possess the ability to access content from a networked Mac or PC, thanks to a built-in UPnP client player. Built-in wireless and Ethernet are also part of the deal.
 The LaCinema Black Play and LaCie Lacinema Black Record feature HDMI terminals for compatibility with HD video playback on high-definition televisions. In fact, 1080p HD movie files and HD JPEGS are decoded while standard-definition videos are upscaled to 1080i. Both devices are sexy and feature swanky interfaces, and the only difference between both models is that the LaCie Lacinema Black Record features DVR functionality and has a few additional terminals. Connectivity on the Record includes HDMI, Component, AV, S-Video, DC, USB and Optical while the Play lacks S-Video and Optical In/Out. The LaCie Black products will start at $430 and are available now.
 For users who don't know what to do with their dusty external hard drives that are packed to the brim with digital files, the LaCie LaCinema Classic Bridge is the answer. This build-your-own media player features USB, HDMI, Optical and AV terminals and allows users to connect an external hard drive to an HDTV. Supported files include MPEG4, MP3, JPEG and HD-JPEG. The good news is that LaCie includes an HDMI cable and supports DivX transcoded videos, but there's no word on camcorder compatibility. Since many of the new AVCHD files are difficult for most systems to handle, there's no guarantee that files will be compatible with the LaCinema Classic Bridge. The easy fix is to simply plug in directly from the camcorder. The LaCie LaCinema Classic Bridge is available now and retails for $100.
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