Fujitsu unveils Blu-ray 37in HD PC-TV

Fujitsu will this month ship a monster high-definition PC-TV hybrid that incorporates not only four TV tuners - two for digital and two for analogue broadcasts - but also twin 300GB hard drives and a dual-layer enabled Blu-ray Disc recorder.

The FMV Deskpower TX series builds a full PC into a 37in, 1,920 x 1,080 LCD TV. The top-end model, for example, contains a 2.8GHz Intel Pentium D 820 dual-core processor, 1GB of memory, a 256MB ATI Radeon X1600 graphics chip and ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. It has the two 7,200rpm SATA 300GB HDDs; a multi-format memory card reader; one Firewire and six USB 2.0 ports; Gigabit Ethernet; and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi. There's an HDMI port on the back, too.

Lesser models sport Pentium 4 CPUs, less memory, less capacious hard drives, plain old DVD±R/RW optical drives and rely on integrated graphics.

The Deskpower's four TV tuners allow for multiple recordings to be made while watching one channel, along with a variety of picture-in-picture options. Each model ships with Windows XP Home Edition and what appears to be Fujitsu's own media centre application and PVR software.

The BD drive will support DVD and CD media, Fujitsu said, and be able to write to single- and dual-layer BD-R and BD-RE discs. Both models sport 5W stereo speakers and a 10W sub-woofer, all three linked up the machines' Yamaha sound engine.

The top-of-the-range Deskpower TX 95S/D will ship in Japan in toward the end of June, Fujitsu said. It's set to retail there for around ¥600,000 ($5,073/£2,911/€4,190). The cheaper TX 90S/D will retail for approximately ¥450,000 ($3,805/£2,183/€3,143) on 21 April. A build-to-order version, the TX 90S/N will be made available from Fujitsu's website, with prices starting at ¥434,000 ($3,670/£2,105/€3,031) at the same time. ®