Iomega ScreenPlay Pro High Definition Multimedia Drive

Best Price:
There is an ever-increasing number of devices that’ll transfer your media from your PC to your TV, from simple hubs that accept data from USB memory, through network streamers, right up to hard disks with cables that hook directly into your TV. The Iomega ScreenPlay Pro HD offers all these options – it’s a hard disk with a TV connection, but it will also stream high-definition video and other media across your network and find files on a USB memory drive. You can even plug another device, such as a camcorder, directly into it and record video straight onto the hard disk.

Features:
The hard disk comes in two sizes – 500GB or 1TB. Plug it into your computer using the supplied USB cable and you can transfer your videos, music and pictures onto it. You can then unplug it from your computer, take it over to your TV and plug it into that. There’s an HDMI cable included, as well as the usual Composite cables, so you’ve got a good choice of connections. If you prefer to keep your unit in place, you can plug USB memory into the device and run your media off that – unfortunately, there’s no option to copy onto the drive this way. Or, if you’ve got a wired network (either Ethernet or HomePlug) you can connect to other PCs and either stream or copy files over the network. However, the only way to copy from the PC is by mapping the drive to your network, which is a tad complex.

Performance:
A device like this always raises as many questions as the key specs on the side of the box answer. By cramming in lots of features, does it spread itself too thin and become merely average at a lot of things? And, if you’ve got one workable option, do you really need the others? In this regard, the Iomega is fairly well spread across it’s various features, which all use the same interface and coexist quite happily. Whether you need all the options is down to personal preference – if you don’t mind copying your files to the hard disk, you may not need its USB hosting or network-sharing options – but it doesn’t hurt that they’re there.

Ease of use:
The device supports a good range of formats that are fairly standard. Video files have to be compressed in one of the MPEG or DivX/Xvid formats (and can be HD quality up to 1080i), music is better with MP3/AC3/OGG/WAV/WMA and photos can only be BMPs or JPEGs. This may mean you have to laboriously converting your collection before you can watch it – we particularly missed WMV and QuickTime video formats.

The interface is menu-based but reasonably attractive. It’s also uniform throughout the various options. One thing lacking on the remote control, however, is a Back button. This would have been really useful while delving through menus. Lastly, the network option offers simple Windows file-sharing and doesn’t act as a UPnP server. This is a bit of a pain as it meant we had to move media to our public folder, rather than being offered a simple means for basic streaming.

Value for money:
Naturally, there’s quite a premium put on all this, considering that you’re actually only buying a hard disk in a fancy case with some handy software pre-installed. However, a normal hard disk won’t plug into your TV and there are few corners cut on this product – the included HDMI cable, for example, is a generous addition to the package. So while it doesn’t come cheap, it’s no rip-off.