Hitachi has announced its fall 2005 "Prius N series" nine PC products. Highlighted products include the "Prius Deck DH75N/DH73N," the industry's first PC that features HDMI terminals.

Hitachi also unveiled the "Prius Air AR37N," the company's first PC that supports recording and playback of terrestrial digital broadcast video programs.

Hitachi develops the Prius Deck series, assuming the series products are connected to other products including PCs and PDP TVs and used as a home server to download digital contents via the Internet. For this purpose, memory capacity of the hard disc drive particularly in the DH75N was expanded to 500 GB. On the other hand, the noteworthy feature of the Prius Air AR37N is that the PC is able to receive and record terrestrial digital broadcast video programs. It also can be connected to such equipment as PDP TVs using D plugs (D1-D4). A "B-CAS card" slot is located on the back of the Prius Air AR37 N console.

Regarding the HDMI 1.1 interface, Hitachi's spokesperson explained, "At the current moment, only few TVs support HDMI plugs. However, we are certain that HDMI will be the key format soon, so our plug technology will be unified to HDMI in the future." For the time being, Hitachi intends to use both D and HDMI plugs in its TVs and monitors.

The Prius Deck PC series feature an ultra-thin case (59mm width) and is equipped with a Pentium D 820 (2.80GHz) CPU. The HDMI interface is connected to the Intel 945G Express chipset through a special HDMI transmitter developed by Silicon Image.