Peter Pachal

HARBORING MUSIC These days, an iPod dock and $3.98 might get you a grande latte at Starbucks, but Escient has a dock model that qualifies as a premium blend. The FP-1 doesn't just stream your iPod music - it completely integrates it into the company's FireBall Music Manager, combining those songs with any tunes you have on servers or PCs.

COOL FACTOR It's nice to see other portable media players keeping up with the iPod, and Toshiba's gigabeat S Series has comparable video chops: a crisp 21/2-inch screen with 320 x 240-pixel resolution.

SERVICE CENTER Harman Kardon's first media server takes your discs and makes them better. Any CD you feed it will be ripped to the convenient 160-GB hard disk. Any DVD you feed it will be upconverted to 720p HD format through the HDMI output. But streaming is this box's main mission: four rooms, four streams - mix 'em however you want.

Keep It Real It's kind of a bizarre resolution for a plasma TV - 1,024 x 1,080 pixels - but Hitachi just might know what it's doing here. Those 1 million pixels are driven by a technology called ALiS (Alternate Lighting of Surfaces) to get the most detail out of 1080i signals (the most common HD format) and bestow a smoother, more filmlike picture.