CES 2006: Cyberhome's HD upscaling personal media players

Cyberhome has been buzzing round the UK market for a few years now mainly selling those mini DVD players, At CES it took the wraps off a range of personal media players and well, we were pretty impressed by them.

The big story with four inch screen PMP400 and seven inch screen PMP700 is that they both include an input that can hook up directly to your digital TV decoder. This then takes the MPEG2 signal which can be directly stored on the product’s 20 Gigabyte hard drive and played back on the screen. The quality of the demo we saw looked amazing.

The other very cool feature is that the devices boast High Definition upscaling. The company claims that they will output a 1080i type signal to a big screen so for example you can watch high def -like images on your home large screen TV from the player’s hard drives. Well it didn’t look like HD to us, but the footage we saw was certainly an improvement on the output of most personal media players. The devices play back the usual formats – MPEG1, 2 and 4 as well DivX and Windows Media 9. They also obviously spins MP3 and play JPEG images too. Both are due to hit the US in the first quarter for $399 and $499 respectively and will probably land in the UK in the summer. Definitely one to watch out for.