4. The Qosmio G25 As Media Center PC

The distinguishing characteristics of a Media Center PC are its built-in support for music, DVD movies, TV, and personal video and images, along with its simple, direct interface and friendly remote control. The Qosmio G25 does all these things well, and it does them quickly and easily once the unit is unpacked, powered up, and the right connections made. The unit works extremely well as a personal entertainment center (and one of your reviewers got many hours of enjoyment using it as a music box, TV, and movie station in his office while working on this assignment!) The quality of the video is extremely good; even though many Media Center PCs produce better looking DVD movies and high-definition video when using 256 MB graphics cards, 128 MB did not seem to be a limitation for this setup.

We also hooked it up to an entertainment center, where we learned that the headphone jack shares a port with SPDIF audio out (a must if you want an external processor to decode DTS, THX, Dolby Digital, or other popular surround sound formats). This took a bit of digging around in the manuals to find. Toshiba does include a nice little spiral-ring flip-book with diagrams of common set-ups and configurations, but they don't really address entertainment center hook-up. It's a good thing that we recognized the need for a special adapter cable to use the SPDIF out to route it into a digital input on our pre-amp/processor, because Toshiba doesn't address that anywhere in the documentation packaged with the unit. There is, however, plenty of additional information available on the Toshiba Web site.

Accessories for the Toshiba Qosmio G25 include (from top to bottom, left to right): remote control receiver, remote control, composite A/V adapter cable, RF input cable and component video cable.

Working with the Qosmio G25 was our first introduction to the Toshiba TV Tuner card, which proved to be another pleasant surprise. It's clearly on a par with better TV tuner cards we've worked with, such as the single-tuner Hauppauge PVR-150MCE or the dual-tuner PVR-500MCE. The picture quality was good, and the unit supports all the right inputs (coaxial, RF antenna, composite video, and S-Video). It also handles 720i resolution, which provides plenty of headroom for dealing with typical overscan and image adjustment issues. It worked well with both a conventional picture tube TV and a digital HD-ready LCD television set.

While using the unit we did get a pleasant surprise. While digital rights issues make it impossible to play DVD audio disks into an entertainment center through an SPDIF connection, that didn't stop the Qosmio from recognizing and playing this kind of media on its own speakers, allowing us to hear some of this kind of audio in pseudo-surround (the best anyone can do with two speakers) for the very first time. In general, we would put the Qosmio on a par with any of the mid-range to high-end Media Center PCs we've worked with, including the Hush Technologies MCE 2005 and the HP z557 Digital Entertainment Center (both of which also fall in the same general price range).