Storex D-522

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Caractéristiques
Connections (HDMI/composite/optical/coaxial)	1 / 1 / 1 / 1
Hard drive bay (2.5''/3.5'')	no / yes
WiFi	no
Ethernet	N.A.
DVB-T tuner	no
Show all specifications

Chip	Boxchip F10
Firmware	1.0.0 - 14/01/2011
SD/HD video entries	no / no
Screen (type)	no
DVD / Blu-Ray	no / no
SDHC	no
USB Host	yes
Backlit remote	no
Other
Dimensions	245 x 175 x 42 mm
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Régis Jehl
Translator: Jack Sims
Test date: April 28, 2011

Terrible quality plastics

Storex has gone for really poor plastic here. The casing has a worse finish than any young child's toy.

Take the example of the grey hood. Just running your nail over it scratches it and wears through the thin coat of paint. You'd think it had been done by hand with a paint brush.

With such a finish, it's amazing Storex is charging so much for the D-522 with its 1 TB hard drive. At this price it should be better, a lot better.

Storex is positioning the D-522 as the flagship media centre in its 2011 range. What does it add in comparison to the 2010 range and how does it match up to the competition and all the new services on offer elsewhere? We'll give you the answers below.

A pared-down interface

Storex obviously hasn't paid much attention to the quality of its product. The finish (see inset), remote and interface make the D-522 look very low-end. The remote is extra flat, with poor handling. The plastic and buttons are very cheap looking. Poor quality merch.

The interface is hardly any better and the available HD TV display area isn't used to its potential with barely 6 lines displayed. This really is bad news for a product sold as a Full HD 1080P-24 product.

The only plus point is the option to display music album covers (integrated only externals won't work). Track data is only compatible with mp3s, Oggs and Flac.

Compatibility: too many bugs

When it comes to media compatibility, it's off on a good footing with Full-HD video playback up to 70 Mbps (x264/MKV). Unfortunately, the image cut out randomly for a few seconds during testing. The problem recurred and the only solution was to reboot. Thankfully, it comes on in under 3 seconds.

Support for various formats is laborious and DVD backup files wont' play. Only backups of Blu-rays in tree structure are supported, though you will have to find the M2TS file of the film manually.

Find all our readings in the media centre face-off

On the audio side, although all Dolby Digital and DTS formats can be transposed to stereo, the lack of support for m4a tracks (used widely in iTunes) is regrettable.

Connectivity: USB and that's it

Connectivity is confined to the essential: HDMI, composite, optical and coaxial. A USB host port allows you to link up peripherals but you can't copy to and from the internal hard drive. For this you must go via a computer, which means you'll have to move the centre to your computer each time you want to do this. There's no network or SDHC reader here.

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