Hands-on With Sony's V1000 Blu-ray Home Entertainment Center

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Good afternoon, everyone. I just spent a bit of time with Sony’s home entertainment server, the HES-V1000. It’s been pretty hard for me to give Sony any sort of praise lately, but some hands-on time with the V1000 is starting to change my opinion.

Seriously, though, who doesn’t want a 200-disc, 500GB, Blu-ray home server? From a design standpoint, the V1000 is gorgeous and very, very sleek. It’s also the first US-based consumer product to be built, rather than the other way around. Thanks, Sony.

The touch controls located on the top were fairly responsive to say the least.

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An assortment of inputs are available in the rear of the unit that you simply need to push for the panel to pop out. Once it’s out the panel lights up and tells you what’s what.

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A quick swipe on the upper right hand corner of the server reveals all the memory card readers. A swipe on the lower left corner ejects the disc tray.

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Thanks to DLNA, you can run 10 different clients aka satellite speakers around your crib, but only four of those clients will play independent tracks from the server. Party Mode syncs them all together for a rockin’ good time.

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It’s so pretty, right? It takes a bit of time to load up your choice of DVD or CD, but it lights up with pretty colors while it does its thing. You can expect lightning fast response time when it’s filtering through 200 discs.

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The interface was simple to use and the photo slideshow was actually pretty cool. The templates were lame, but there’s always the possibility to download more some time in the future. The slideshow demo was actually tolerable. I give the V1000 a thumbs up from the brief time I had with it. More details here.