cinelife said:
Hi guys,
While it is true that K is introducing a new "starter" system, it has not officially announced the specifics. There is no reason for concern here. The new system is designed to allow for a lower end entry into the world of K. It still requires significant expense to get the new system up to the storage capacity and multi-room functionality that most of us have. K has not abandoned the system we all have. It is still available and viewed by K as their "flagship" product. Support will continue as usual. More folks finding their way to K is a good thing and can only benefit ALL owners going forward.
Jim
Jim,
I can't speak for others, but I for one am not worried and don't think that other K owners have any reason to worry either. There's room in the marketplace for multiple system types and given the details already mentioned (which I have no reason to question as inaccurate given the source), the new system is at least more limited in capacity and I might guess that zone limitations might also surface as another differentiator. And then there's HD support which we have in the high end system and will have in BR and/or HD-DVD support once the details are worked out. I could see that, after those are finalized, a reader that supports HD disc import will be standard on a base high end K system while it would be optional on the entry level one. Those last 2 are just guesses on my part, but they don't seem out of the realm of possibility. After all, if you do have 2 similar products ate very different price points, you have to ensure that value is reatined in the higher end one in part by differentiating the feature set. Really, in my mind, this new system is definately a different offering and there's no reason to think that K won't offer both systems going forward.
This new system does pose a few questions though. For one, as it appears to utilize 750GB drives, are those now or will they be shortly available for the high end system? Secondly, can this new combination reader and movie player be used in the high end system? I could see some use for it to consolidate space in certain zones. That direct play ability could also be useful to all owners for rental discs, promo DVDs you get about this product or that, checking out a friend's home video, etc
The last question I have has less to do with this new system and more to do with increasing drive capacities. With 750GB drives, the capacity per drive has reached a point to where I might very well want to replace my 300GB drives with these larger ones. I recognize that there won't be any trade-in value for the used drives and that's fine. However, I think it would be very helpful for K to have some official way to swap out smaller drives for larger ones. The RAID system they use technically allows for you to replace drives, even if the new drives don't have the same capacity of the old. The issue is that for one, it's a time consuming process as you have to do them one by one and each disc takes hours to rebuild. Secondly, K tech folks have said more than once that they don't recommend completely rebuilding a server with all new drives in the manner I described. With that much successive rebuilding, they have concerns about 100% data accuracy. So, it would be cool if they came up with some way for owners to accomplish this.
Jeff