PSX does a lot, but not well

TOKYO — The perfect hybrid would embody the best of both worlds. But Sony Corp.’s PSX, touted as a "crossover" between video-game machine and consumer electronics component, barely manages to be a mere sum of its parts.

The PSX, which just went on sale in Japan, may sound like a good deal — it packs into one sleek box a DVD recorder, analog TV tuner and digital video and music player and recorder along with a PlayStation2 game console.

The machine, planned for overseas sales next year for a still undecided price, costs $920 here for a 250-gigabyte hard drive version, which can hold a few dozen movies, and $740 for a 160 GB model.

The machine is considerably less attractive if you happen to be one of the nearly 63 million people in the world who already own a PlayStation2. In that case, you may want to consider getting separate DVD and personal video recorders.

One reason is the last-minute downgrade by Sony of some of the PSX’s initially promised features.

In October, Sony had said the PSX would record to DVD at 24 times faster than playback speed. But it halved the speed just two weeks before the machine’s release. That means recording a two-hour movie to a disc will take about half an hour, instead of the 15 minutes fairly common in comparable DVD recorders.

The PSX was also supposed to handle three standards for DVD recorders: DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW. But the commercial product won’t handle DVD+RW at a time when compatibility is increasingly in demand.

The product also won’t process MP3 music files as had been promised.

Sony officials say they merely ran out of time for fine-tuning to ship the PSX before the end-of-the-year shopping rush as they had promised. They say such features will be added through downloads; the PSX is networked with a built-in Ethernet port. And they add that orders accepted at retailers in advance are going fine, although the company refused to disclose numbers.

Where the PSX clearly comes out ahead as part-game machine is the nimble way the remote controller responds after the machine is turned on and its various functions pop up on your TV screen as icons lined up next to each other. A gentle bending of the control button sends the cursor zipping across the screen.

one level, the PSX works as a compromise because it allowed Sony to play catch-up in DVD recorders. Panasonic, or Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., dominates global share at about 50 percent.

But like many compromises, the PSX lacks some oomph.