Digital Home Theater Storms CES

Media Management
Escient will be demonstrating its new Vision series at CES, with a product launch expected next month. The Vision Series Media Management products offer the ability to play and import movies, videos, music, and photos using the front-panel drive and home network. Escient's Vision Series products, including two versions of an all-in-one server/player, Models VS-100 and VS-200, as well as the VC-1 networked audio/video zone player (all with HDMI 1.3 capability), and the large-capacity VX-600 media server, will provide consumers with new solutions for managing, accessing and enjoying movies and music throughout the home, all via a single interface.

The VS100 and VS200 are advanced hard drive-based components with RAID backup, that let users store, manage and stream all their movies, music and photos to a host of devices within their home network. The VS-100 and VS-200 all-in-one server players and the VC-1 networked audio/video zone player feature HDMI 1.3 support and upscaling to 1080p for high image quality from all sources. All three also feature external control capability via Ethernet.

The VS-100 provides dual 500-GB drives while the VS-200 provides dual 1-TB drives, and both also feature RAID 1 redundancy. The VC-1 is a high-performance networked audio/video zone player that can stream audio and video from Vision servers, providing playback of music, movies, and photos from any room of the home. The large-capacity media server, Model VX-600 features four 1-TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration and provides virtually unlimited storage expansion capability for Vision VS and VC devices.

Escient's Vision Series products are scheduled to ship in February at the following suggested retail prices: VS-100 ($3,999), VS-200 ($5,999), VC-1 ($1,999), VX-600 ($7,999).

Next: Assuring Multimedia Connectivity