Sharp has announced an “AV Center PC” in Japan, which includes a 26 inch widescreen LCD. This is the first desktop PC in the company’s Mebius line; but they’re pulling some technicality bullshit on us by saying it’s an “AV Center PC,” not a desktop.
As you can see from the image, it looks much more like a DVD recorder than PC.
Plenty more details after the jump.
They appear to be serious about this whole AV setup. Home theater gurus will appreciate the integrated inputs and outputs; particularly the integrated S/PDIF output is nice [Although fairly common on a lot of motherboards these days. -joel]. There’s also an LED panel on the front of the case for displaying information such as hard drive/DVD capacity, TV channel, and even the damn time.
The included widescreen LCD I mentioned earlier can go up to 1366 x 768, so you’re at least set in that department. But that’s just it; Sharp hasn’t made mention of the PC being available by itself. If you’ve already got a TV, I guess you better throw it in the garbage. On the other hand, I wouldn’t exactly pass this screen up — it’s got some beefy specs, including enough inputs and outputs to choke a horse.
On the PC front, Sharp has included the “StationAV” software, which is basically just a launcher that can be controlled entirely with the (included) remote controller. This is reminiscient of Windows XP Media Center Edition, if you’ve ever used that. Inside the system itself, you get a 2.66Ghz Celeron, 512MB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive.
All in all, it’s good to see a large manufacturer introduce a PC of this form factor, but a shame to see that they won’t be selling just the PC for people who already have a nice display.
Read – Press Release [Sharp]
