Imerge – Beaten on Performance and Price!

Kaleidescape has always been associated as the pinnacle of DVD Media Servers in the marketplace but they have also been considered more expensive than the other players in the market.

Recently we looked into pricing comparisons in Australia and even we were surprised how Kaleidescape was not only cheaper to purchase, but provided far greater value for money!

Now Imerge do produce an audio only server (Imerge Sound Server S2000) which Kaleidescape doesn’t but the new Kaleidescape Mini System provides video as well as audio for only $ 2,800 more!

So let’s look at the comparative pricing:

Imerge S3004B-400 – 4 zones audio only, 400 Gig of storage, No RAID support.  $11,300.00 inc GST

Kaleidescape Mini System with 2 drives – 1 x movie / music zone, 2 x additional audio only zones, 500 Gig of Storage expandable to 1.5 TB, RAID K, additional cascading of mini systems and servers, additional player support up to 15 additional simultaneous movie or music zones.  $14,129.00 inc GST


As you can see, value for money there really is no question that Kaleidescape provides you with flexibility and future proofing of your investment.

Now let’s look at the Imerge Media Servers against the Kaleidescape 1RU Server:

Imerge MS-5000 Media server – 1 x movie zones, 4 x music zones (2 digital only), 3TB storage, RAID 5, non expandable. – $ 29,650.00 inc GST

Kaleidescape 1RU Server with 4 1Tb drives – 3TB of storage, RAID K, Cascade server design
Kaleidescape 1080p Mini player – 1 x Movie zone
Kaleidescape Music player – 4 x Audio zones (both analogue and digital) $ 28,965.00 inc GST

Additional Media players

• Imerge MP-1000 $9,430.00 inc GST

VS.

• Kaleidescape 1080p Movie Player $5,244.00 inc GST

Or

• Kaleidescape 1080p Mini Player (No drive for loading content)  $3,561.00 inc GST

Not only is Kaleidescape cheaper and more flexible on the original purchase, additional media zones can be added at less than half the price of an Imerge Media player!

One of the most important things is that all Kaleidescape platforms are interoperable, something that Imerge haven’t been able to achieve.

Purchase a Mini System with the intent to catalogue your CD collection and maybe a couple of DVD’s. In a year or two you might find that you now have an extensive DVD collection that you wish to add to your Kaleidescape system and it is as easy as adding an additional server or mini players to increase your storage requirements.

Regardless of how many servers or players on your system, to the user it is one big system and dependant on configuration it can store up to 1800 DVD’s or 19,800 CD’s on a single 3RU server and support up to 45 simultaneous zones!

Makes you feel sorry for all those people who bought an Imerge doesn’t it?