Harman Kardon brings high-end media centre to Blighty

Harman Kardon has begun selling its high-price 250GB media centre system in the UK.

Harman Kardon's DMC 1000: quarter of a terabyte of music storage

The DMC 1000 packs in a CD and DVD player, though while it'll auto-rip music onto the hard drive, it won't do the same with movies and TV shows. It will upscale them to HD resolution if you have an HD TV attached over HDMI. It also has composite- and component-video outputs and s-video.

No shortage of ports

HK offers an optional add-on iPod dock, allowing musical content to be copied over to player, and the DMC 1000 will also let you transfer songs to USB storage devices and memory cards (SD/SDHC/MMC/MemoryStick/CompactFlash). It can be burned to CD-R/RW too.

Round the back it has a digital audio connectors and a raft of analogue jacks for multi-room speaker sets.

We'd hope so at the price: $2999 in the US, £1800 over here. Phew. Fortunately, you can get its little brother, the DMC-250, for around £450. It lacks a built-in hard drive, but you can get a lot more than 250GB of storage for the £1350 price difference.