I got one in Early January - Very cool unit if you are looking for a BD Changer, but if you are looking to do all that other stuff photos, movies & music, well let’s just say you need to have patience.
You all know the spec's so I won’t go over that here - just my experience with using the unit.
First: Blue Ray - Nice!!!, moving glass loading function, single disc at a time - a bit slow when trying to get a bunch of movies in it, but overall nice. the playback it what it is 1080p. cant say anything bad about this!
Music - if you are like most of us, we have iTunes and an iPod, so we have lots of MP3 on our computer, but if you don't have a WinXP box your SOL, as the uploading software is PC based only. I'm a Mac user and is using XP loaded into Parallels... it works. Some of the issues I’m having with this is that fact that you can link to the music directory, but not to any playlist and I have not found a way to create a playlist in the HES unit. it does store them via Album. Which is OK if you have just a few albums, but if you load lots then your will be searching for a while.
I have not loaded any music CD's, as I don’t own any – I’m iTunes everything!
Movies - Well there is no way to transfer your Computer based movies to the HES, you have to burn them to DVD then import. A bit cumbersome, but works OK! Photos: CD - copied photos to a CD and they load OK on the HES, only a bit slow loading & payback viewing - especially if you want to jump ahead images there is about a 5-9 sec lag before the image will actually change on screen. Also some could not be loaded at all, I'm not sure to my problem as I'm still working on testing the unit completely - but there is a write up about file format, size, RGB, color-space and more in the Manual. I'm reading it and should have an answer tonight!
Photos: CF - Took my CF card from my Canon 30d and loaded it into the HES, the first think I noticed is that it does not show you all of the photos in the directories, I Have a 8gb CF card and the camera puts over 500 photos per directory and the HES can only recognized 500 images per directory - major issue as some of my CF folders have 600+ and if I load my CF from my EOS Mark III which created directories with up to 1000 images, I'll never get them all on the HES.
I have not connected my camcorder yet so I’m not sure how that will play out. There a bunch more features to this unit that I have not worked with yet, so ill really cannot comment on those yet – but it’s a great Blue Ray Jukebox which is why I bought it in the first place..
All-in-All: if you bought the unit to do all the other stuff - photos, movie and music sharing not to forget to mention their storybook cd/dvd creation SW, I think you will be disappointed.
If you are looking for a BD Jukebox - This is the only game in town and it’s a very good!
By The way - I also use a couple of Apple TV’s connected to my iTunes Music and Movie Library on my Intel Mac and that is an awesome product for photos, movie and music sharing! Plus it’s only $249, whereas the HES cost me over $3700 (w/extended warranty).
