LaCie on Monday announced the release of the LaCinema Rugged, a USB 2.0 hard disk drive equipped with a High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connector. It’s priced starting at $199.
Data transferred to the drive is visible on any display. Equipped with an HDMI interface, you can connect the drive directly to a high-definition TV display, or you can connect to other TVs using a composite video connection. The drive manages 1080i upscaling itself. It also includes a wireless remote control, and is equipped with analog stereo and optical audio connections.
The drive is capable of playing back MP3, WMA, AC3, Ogg Vorbis and Windows AAC audio formats; MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video codecs, and JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP digital image formats.