The All-in-One Battle: Dell's XPS One 24 vs. Apple's iMac

Blu-ray Support

The XPS One model Dell sent me features a built-in Blu-ray drive, a clear advantage over the competing iMac - provided that you actually have a Blu-ray collection. For what it's worth, when playing a movie the Blu-ray drive is actually quieter than when the HDD is being accessed, not to beat a dead horse or anything.

Blu-ray playback is handled by the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GPU in the system, so CPU utilization on my test sample's Core 2 Quad Q8200 remained at a sub 15% level the entire time I watched Casino Royale while writing this review. While CPU utilization was nice and low, sometimes the application would skip frames when decoding a movie. I informed Dell of my issue and they're working on reproducing the problem, I noticed the dropped frames on Casino Royale and Transformers, although Batman Begins worked just fine. See a common trend? Allow me to illuminate the situation. Both Casino Royale and Transformers use the H.264 codec, Batman Begins is a VC-1 title. This appears to be a NVIDIA driver or an application issue unfortunately newer drivers weren't available at the time of publication, so we'll have to wait on Dell to resolve the problem, although I'm quite convinced it's a H.264 decoding issue.

We've already looked at NVIDIA's Blu-ray playback quality and performance and its role in the XPS One is no different. Despite NVIDIA's excellent support for 24p playback, the XPS One's display isn't capable of a 24Hz refresh rate so you'll see some jitter when watching 1080p/24 movies, but this is the case on most consumer level displays so we can't be too picky. Not to mention that the XPS One isn't really intended to be a HTPC replacement, its Blu-ray support is simply a nice feature.

Blu-ray application support is provided by Cyberlink's PowerDVD DX and is loosely integrated into Windows Media Center, selecting the Blu-ray disc option from within Vista Media Center (VMC) simply launches the standalone PowerDVD DX application. PowerDVD DX is hardly the best Blu-ray player in the world; you have no ability to configure the application's settings, upon closing the application you have to manually get back into the VMC interface and I even ran into a problem where I couldn't get the menu controls to work anymore when watching Transformers, requiring a full reboot. None of these are Dell-specific problems, but just issues with the Cyberlink player in general.

Dell uses a Panasonic UJ-225S drive, which can read and write to both single and dual layer DVDs and Blu-ray discs. BD-R/BD-RE discs can be written to at 1X or 2X depending on if they are single or dual layer discs.

All in all the Blu-ray drive is a nice feature of the top end model, though not entirely necessary it is an option you simply can't get on the competing iMac. Blu-ray discs are increasing in popularity and it never hurts to be able to play back all types of content, although personally I'm not sure if I'd opt for $2299 version simply for Blu-ray support.

Integrated TV Tuner

The XPS One, unlike the iMac, ships with an integrated analog/ATSC tuner which does give it a convenience advantage over its competition, especially if you're going to use it in a dorm room or other locale where you need cable TV access but would rather not have a separate TV setup. Note that there is no support for CableCARD, so all you're going to get are unencrypted HDTV channels on this tuner. Unfortunately the software setup on the XPS One 24 wouldn't allow me to tune to anything other than analog cable channels, so I couldn't test the supposed QAM functionality of the AverMedia A317 combo tuner in the box. It did work with analog cable though.