Black Boxes: Sony Vaio PCV-RZ14G

by Charles Fulton
Summer/Fall 2003

Company: Sony Electronics
Phone: (877) 865-SONY
Web: www.sonystyle.com
Price: $1,700

A true jack of all trades, Sony's VAIO PCV-RZ14G has the gusto to whiz through a vast array of video and audio tasks.

Out of the Box
The machine's copious accessory kit included a few surprises, including a remote control with a USB receiver, a smaller-than-usual wired keyboard and adapters for using the NTSC video output.

Once we hoisted the machine onto our test bench, we dug into all of its various nooks and crannies to see what power may lie within. Underneath a CD-ROM drive, Sony mounted a Memory Stick slot next to a floppy drive. A flip-down door at the bottom of the front panel includes two USB ports; component and S-video inputs; L/R RCA audio inputs and a four-pin FireWire port. The rear panel is a little intimidating due to the sheer number of ports, including four more USB ports, a 6-pin FireWire port, video inputs and outputs, an optical digital audio output, an RF input and a DVI output for connecting a flat-panel display.

The left-side panel was very easy to remove to access the interior of the computer, in case you decide to add memory, hard drives or another PCI card. A small MicroATX form factor motherboard sits at the heart of this computer. The first thing we noticed there was the gigantic heat sink for the machine's 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor.

When we first turned on the VAIO, the fan spun right up to full speed, giving the impression that this was going to be a noisy machine to live with. That impression changed quickly, however. The fan promptly wound down to a whisper as Windows XP Home began loading. It booted up quickly.

The small wired keyboard had a number of custom buttons for quick access to the multimedia and Internet applications that were preloaded into the computer. You can quickly get to the Web, your email, your music, digital photos, video and even Sony's help screens with a quick tap on a key. The keyboard omitted the text editing keys (e.g. Insert and Home) that are often found between the QWERTY section of the keyboard and the numeric keypad. Instead, the keyboard has an Fn key that allows a single key to have multiple functions, much like a laptop keyboard might have.

Hot Giga Pocket
Once an off-air antenna or analog cable is connected to the RF input, it takes only a few clicks to get into Giga Pocket, the machine's DVR (digital video recorder) application. Recorded video programs are called “capsules” and can, in theory, be shared with other computers on your LAN, through an application called PicoPlayer (this application was not included on our machine, so we did not test this on our network).

Giga Pocket uses the nVIDIA GeForce4MX 440 video card overlay to output video to the computer monitor or to a television display (we tested it with a 27” Zenith console TV and were quite pleased with the results). We didn't notice any way to use the television as the primary display device, however. You can also use a composite video source, like a satellite receiver or a digital cable box, but the machine lacks an IR blaster, so unless all the programs you want to record are on one channel, this isn't the box that will replace your beloved TiVo or ReplayTV.

Speaking of DVR functionality, Giga Pocket doesn't handle live TV in the same way a set-top DVR does. You can rewind and pause live TV only when you're recording a program. That is to say, if you're just watching TV, Giga Pocket just passes the signal through to your TV; it doesn't automatically buffer it to the hard drive to enable DVR functions.

To schedule programs to record, we clicked a button and the Web browser opened to Zap2it.com. This allowed us to schedule recordings with one click of the remote. We really liked the way Zap2it set up our channel lineup, since we could re-map and delete channels quite easily. This could be a huge plus if you live in an area where you receive your off-air stations from translators instead of the main channels. The included remote control can change the channel on the TV as well as control DVD playback.

Home DVD
If you own a camcorder (analog, DV or MICROMV), you can bring in your video via the analog or FireWire ports. Sony includes three desktop video-related programs: Sony DVGate, Sony MovieShaker and Adobe Premiere LE 6.0. We effortlessly brought some video into MovieShaker from a Panasonic Mini DV camcorder via the front FireWire port. We made a few minor edits and exported the video to MPEG-2, in preparation for creating a DVD.

The VAIO PCV-RZ14G includes Sony's Click to DVD software, a template-driven DVD authoring program that will burn DVDs to the Pioneer DVR-104 DVD-R/RW drive. Click to DVD includes several very handsome templates, and allowed us to add chapters, customize our menus, preview the project and, finally, burn a disc. The encoding went quickly and smoothly with our test project. The final disc played beautifully in our Samsung test player.

Your other optical authoring needs are covered with Veritas' RecordNow DX, which allows you to copy discs and make music and data discs.

Multimedia Manager
Sony SonicStage software manages your digital music library. If you have a personal music player that accommodates Memory Stick media and plays ATRAC, ATRAC3 or WMA-format files, SonicStage makes ripping and encoding your music very straightforward. You can also rip your CDs to straight PCM, if you'd rather encode to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis (among other audio formats).

The provided speakers sound quite good, even though they are simple, full-range speakers with no tweeters or subwoofer. Power is supplied by the computer's power supply, so you don't have to plug another device into the wall. This is a nice touch for those of us with limited room on our surge protectors or UPSs.

Not a DVR replacement
The Giga Pocket features are solid, but most likely won't meet the expectations of long-term DVR users. However, we expect the software to continue to evolve, and possibly even trickle down to more models as time goes on. The PC is invading the living room, and this VAIO is one of the vanguard.

If this machine replaced anything in your component stack, we'd expect that component to be your VCR. The DVD burning capabilities of this machine are commendable if you're sticking to authoring simple discs. More complex projects would simply require the purchase of more capable authoring software.

Overall, we found the machine to be quite stable once we installed all of the relevant Windows Updates and Sony patches. The machine represents a new direction for computers in the home entertainment system. With the release of Microsoft Windows XP Media Center and the continuing proliferation of Linux, we expect machines like this to become more common in the future. We applaud Sony on this trailblazing effort.

SMART SPECS
Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Processor: Intel P4 2.53GHz
RAM: 512MB DDR SDRAM
Hard Drive: 120GB, 7200RPM
DVD burner: Pioneer DVR-104 (DVD-R/RW)
CD-ROM drive: Asus
Display card: nVIDIA GeForce 4MX 440, 64MB VRAM, VGA and DVI outputs, RF input, 2 A/V inputs, A/V output
Modem: 56k v.90
Ethernet: Onboard 10/100 Fast Ethernet
Expansion slots: 1 AGP , 3 PCI, 1 CNR
Other connectors: 6 USB 2.0, 2 FireWire (one 4-pin, one 6-pin), optical digital audio out, parallel port, microphone in, line-level audio in, line-level audio out