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Sony is a company that has built its reputation on stylish and desirable products. I was therefore fully expecting to see a Windows XP Media Center PC from Sony last year when Microsoft released its living room OS. But Sony didn’t produce a Media Center PC, instead choosing to create its own style of media PC.

The PCV-V1/G is the latest incarnation of Sony’s media PC range, and it has to be said that this is the first device I've seen that can challenge the Elonex eXentia in terms of style and integration.

The PC itself looks fantastic, fronted by a 15in TFT display. The screen is one of Sony's X-Black units (formerly Onyx Black) and the image produced is quite simply superb. Yes, as always there's a little more reflection than with a standard TFT, but that's only a small price to pay for the strong vibrant colours and incredibly bright image. The native resolution is 1,024 x 768 which is pretty standard for a 15in screen, and considering that this is not your average PC, it's totally acceptable.

Although the screen is excellent, you won't be using it to play the latest games, due to the SiS graphics chipset driving it. That said, you'll have specific duties in mind for a machine like this and it's unlikely that playing games will be among them,

The screen is surrounded by a brushed aluminum bezel that's spoiled only by the obligatory Intel Pentium 4 and Windows XP stickers attached to it. Below the bezel is a mesh grille hiding the integrated stereo speakers. Although there can't be much room for speakers in there, the quality of sound produced is very good. Sitting proud from the right hand side of the bezel is the power switch which just looks too cool. It's a piece of transparent Perspex that glows green when the unit is powered on, and red when in standby mode. It's touches like this that separate Sony products from everything else.

On the right side of the system case you'll find a DVD writer, so you'll be able to burn DVD-R/RW discs as well as CD-R/RW discs. Unfortunately DVD writing performance is limited to single speed so you might want to go and make a cup of coffee if you're burning a whole disc. Below the DVD writer is a PC Card slot and a Memory Stick Pro slot. The latter will make it easy to transfer photos from your Sony digital camera, while the former should make it easy to transfer photos from any digital camera via a PC Card adapter.

On the left side of the case you'll find a plethora of connectors. To start with there are the standard line-out, headphone and microphone sockets. Next to these there's the 56k modem port, a four-pin FireWire port, an Ethernet connector and two USB 2.0 ports. On top of this you get S-Video and composite video inputs, as well as stereo audio inputs. The final connector is an aerial socket for the integrated TV tuner.

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