LaCie is a company which has been making stylish external drives for many years. And now the company is turning its hand to streaming media. The LaCinema Premier is a 500GB external drive, which also includes video outputs to connect to your TV.

Design
LaCie has a reputation for design, so we were a little disappointed that the LaCinema is essentially a rectangular box. And talk about black. This thing's blacker than Hotblack Desiato's stuntship. If it weren't for the blindingly blue lights you would never find it in the dark (or in the Restaurant car park).

The front panel consists of the Power button and activity lights, a four way cursor, and an unusual rocker/menu button similar to the iPod scroll wheel but nowhere near as useful. You see, the rocker switch is also a Play/Stop button, with an awkward "OK" in the middle. And as the button is so obfuscatingly black it's sometimes hard to tell which you're pressing.

The supplied remote is pretty bog standard for a device as cheap as this. While it does include volume buttons, the play and stop aren't anywhere near the FFWD and REW controls which is confusing. It does come with a dedicated "Synch" button that is handy for audio-synching badly-encoded films.

Features
The LaCinema's biggest attraction is the fact that it's both a storage device and a media centre. After connecting the device to your TV you will be presented with a  user interface enabling you to watch movies, listen to music, or view your happy snaps.

Though the specs list doesn't name it, we found the LaCie supports XViD files (and presumably some DivX), which one-ups the Apple TV. Other supported formats include DVD iso files -- that's right, rip non-copy protected DVDs straight to the drive -- MPEG-1/2/4, Ogg Vorbis, WMA and AAC.

Unlike the Apple TV, though, the LaCie is missing some essential connections. The first is HDMI -- there is only a 1080i-compatible component output and a choice of electrical or optical digital connections. For legacy TVs the drive also supports composite, S-Video and stereo RCA. For users who want to hide the drive in a cupboard an IR port is included, though you would have to purchase the IR extender separately.

The LaCinema interface is relatively straightforward.

Also, the only way to connect the drive to your PC is via USB 2.0. Missing are the faster eSATA, FireWire and gigabit Ethernet connections. But this shows a different approach to the same problem the Apple TV tackles -- instead of relying on a home network, the LaCinema enables you to connect to any PC you choose as USB is certainly more universal. Of course, the LaCinema will also work as an external USB 2.0 drive and comes with a "one touch" backup utility.

Like many devices of its type the LaCie features updateable firmware which can add new features and bug fixes. The newest available firmware offers an "improved user interface" and added a screen saver. However, despite downloading the latest firmware from the LaCie Web site and the device recognising it, we were presented with a message telling us that the .bin file wasn't for the LaCinema and to "power off DIVX player".

Performance
Despite our updating woes, the LaCinema was otherwise as easy to use as expected. Windows detected it straight away and we were able to shift files across at a relatively zippy pace -- write speeds were 24 MB/s and read speeds 21 MB/s respectively according to the SiSoft Sandra benchmark.

Navigating the user interface is straightforward, while not as pretty as some we've seen -- including the various Windows Media Centers. Each of the various icons leads you to a menu starting from the root of the drive. Not pretty, but should be intuitive to users of Windows Explorer. One thing we found, however, was that the text quality wasn't very good -- particularly at the highest 1080i resolution -- with a rippling "heat haze" effect. 480 and 720P looked OK on our Pioneer PDP-5000EX.

Movie files looked decent, and were certainly the equal of replaying the same files on a Dell XPS M1330 via the HDMI connection. Unlike Media Center though, there is no way to skip 30 seconds ahead -- the "Next" button takes you to the next file. You'll have to resort to the FFWD button, unfortunately. We also discovered that though the specs list trumpets the device's upscaling capabilities, upscaling had little to no effect. Noisy movies looked the same regardless of which resolutions we set.

MP3 playback was quite listenable as well, though the interface could use some work. Unfortunately, there is no playback screen for MP3s -- just a miniscule timer in the corner. This could be a concern for plasma users, as you may want to turn off your TV or risk burn in. But the latest update promises to fix this problem. Another niggle we encountered was that you also couldn't change the screen while playing back music. You needed to press stop to browse your media collection or look at photos.

Though movies and MP3s were replayed with some finesse, the same didn't apply to the Photo function. In particular, how the device handled images in the vertical Portrait mode. While Landscape mode pictures were reproduced well, photos in portrait scaled really badly, with huge jaggies. Happy snaps looked like lo-res photos no matter which resolution we set the LaCie to.