The HP Pavilion Media Center TV m8100y ($2,199 direct, $2,769 with 24-inch widescreen LCD monitor) comes with innovative features like a quad-core processor, a bay for removable hard drives, and a combo HD DVD-ROM/Blu-ray burner drive. This is a multimedia user's dream machine. Though its price is higher than that of some other multimedia PCs, the money is well spent, with a wealth of new technologies to keep a multimedia maven happy.

The m8100y sits in a glossy piano-black version of HP's high-end case. It still has the docking area on top where you can slip in a digital camera docking station or store a bunch of optical media (DVDs, CDs, and the like). The case also has a Personal Media Drive bay hidden behind a panel door, with an A/V input/output under another panel that includes video ports for hooking up any sort of camcorder or VCR, including even old-school VHS and Hi8. In the back you'll find a number of ports, including an HDMI port, which is still rare for any PC. This is totally the PC that can hook up to a variety of sources and displays, including that HDTV sitting in your home office or home theater room.

The system comes with a first: a combination HD DVD-ROM drive with Blu-ray burner. With this drive, you can view any of the recent HD DVD or Blu-ray high-definition movies, as well as good old DVDs. The drive can burn DVDs and BD-R/RE discs, but not HD DVDs. This isn't too much of an issue, since Blu-ray discs can hold up to 50GB, compared with HD DVD's 30GB. The drive alone adds $600 to the cost of the PC, but if you're into HD video at all and are an early adopter, it's worth the price.

Also inside the case is a dual NTSC/ATSC (HDTV) over-the-air tuner, which can let you record two programs at once from an antenna and/or an unscrambled cable. There's a CableCARD option on built-to-order m8100y PCs. Including the front and back panel inputs, you can get video into the system via cable/antenna, FireWire, composite video, and S-Video. Between these ports, the USB ports, and the digital media card reader, you should be able to get video, music, and photos from virtually any analog or digital source into this PC. Though the resulting cables could be a bit of a nightmare, the ability to import those videos from both your brand-new SDHC-based digital camcorder and your 15-year-old Hi8 analog camcorder may be worth it.

Once the video is on the PC, you can burn it to either DVD-recordable or BD (Blu-ray)-recordables. This means that your SDTV home videos from 1998 can be burned alongside your HDTV home videos from 2008—an advantage that will keep both the budding Spielberg and the proud, tech-savvy parent happy.

Other features include the Personal Media Drive, a full-size desktop-class drive that can hold up to 750GB of data, in a portable form factor. I like the fact that the Personal Media Drive, like all HP removable drives, can use a standard USB cable on PCs that don't have a drive bay. You will have to use a power adapter for other non-HP PCs. That said, HP is the one system builder that has done the removable drive thing right.

Speaking of doing things right, one of the benefits of buying the mainstream m8100y over HP's less-expensive models is that it comes with a 15-month subscription to Norton Internet Security, as opposed to the 30-to-60-day trial periods of the cheaper models. I think this should be standard for all models, and I applaud HP for including this important safety measure.

Performance-wise, the m8100y packs in a lot to keep the multimedia maven happy. While the overclocked Velocity Micro ProMagix (8800 GTS SLI) does beat the m8100y on the benchmark tests, the m8100y is one of the fastest nonoverclocked mainstream systems out there on our multimedia tests. The m8100y's 59-second Windows Media Encoder score and 44-second Photoshop scores are top-notch, and its 3DMark06 score of 2,409 isn't too shabby. The m8100y is capable of handling even professional-level video and photo-editing jobs, while giving you a good measure of 3D performance. It's no screaming gaming rig, but it will be able to handle the 3D tasks a typical user asks of a system.

The HP Pavilion Media Center TV m8100y is a multimedia maven's dream machine. It has all sorts of buzz-worthy technologies wrapped up in an attractive case with virtually all the inputs and outputs that one could want in a PC. If it weren't for the vertical orientation of the tower, I could see this system finding its way into the home theater cabinets of video enthusiasts, especially considering the system's HDMI port. Anyhow, this is home base for a multitude of multimedia: photos, music, video—your entire digital life.

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