The screen showed your location overlaid on a road map, and you could zoom in or out, add locations, plot routes and leave 'bread crumb' trails. When installed you could use the system like any other navi. Installation of the power supply and GPS antenna were semi-permanent, as the former had to be tucked away carefully to avoid unsightly cable dangle, and the latter needed to be clipped to the handbrake. In-car navigation systems have been popular in Japan for a very long time, but I'm not sure to whom this particular system seemed a good idea. It has a sliding volume control, and one speaker, as well as tint + brightness controls and a Front/Rear switch, which serves a very secret purpose (I have no idea what).Ī GPS antenna port and a GPS antenna/receiver were standard equipment. The screen is capable of displaying both interlaced and non-interlaced video. When closed it sits flush with the CD door, and has quite a slim profile, when closed the system is approximately the same height as a normal Saturn. It clips to the back of the system and plugs in with a short cable to the 'monitor out' port. It draws its power from the system, so no additional power supply is required. It was a backlit active-matrix TFT screen, a very expensive process at the time, with resolution, clarity and contrast surpassing any other console screen - equal in vibrancy but larger than the Turbo Express. The LCD screen was released at the same time as the system, but only one thousand units per month were produced - half the number of systems. Possibly then only 2,000 units were produced.
Unconfirmed: I've been told the system was in production for only one month. Add another 45,000 Yen ($443) for the LCD screen and you've got a system far beyond the reach of most people.Īlso accounting for the system's rarity are the production quantities: only two thousand HiSaturn Navi units were produced every month. This certainly helps explain the system's rarity - the price of this system without a screen was more than $1000 above the price of a normal Saturn. The launch price was 150,000 Yen, or about $1480 US Dollars at the time. In addition to the standard Saturn ports (serial, AV + controller) it has two microphone inputs for karaoke use, a GPS antenna port, video and audio inputs, a TV-tuner port and a line-out port. It's considerably heavier because of the added components, even considering most of the power supply was made external. It's smaller than your average Saturn - about the same width and length, but almost a third shorter and it's nearly flat on top. The Saturn was only a year old when Hitachi threw out the Sega mold and released a completely redesigned system jam packed with goodies. All three manufacturers, Sega, JVC + Hitachi, released older oval-button systems and newer round-button systems, and none of these are particularly rare, but then Hitachi threw down the gauntlet. Both JVC's V-Saturn and Hitachi's HiSaturn were merely coloured variants of the Sega Saturn, with no additional features or capabilities. As part of a co-branding or cross-licensing agreement, both of these companies produced their own variants of the Saturn hardware. When Sega was creating the Saturn system they enlisted the help of several long-time partners - JVC provided the CD mechanism and Hitachi provided the dual SH-2 CPUs.
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As of this writing (3) you can expect to pay over $1200 USD to get one of these in decent shape with a screen, and more if you get one in like-new condition with all the boxes and manuals intact. In fact, even considering the piles of weird pre-NES hardware, the HiSaturn Navi still ranks as one of the most ridiculously expensive and elusive systems you're ever likely to see. No console before or since dared dream of including half these features, which is why to this day it is probably the rarest and most expensive post-NES console. Its feature list was enormous: slim profile, car adaptor, LCD screen, GPS Navigation, karaoke.
In December 1995, about a year after the Saturn launched in Japan and only a few short months after the Saturn's launch in North America, Hitachi released the single most extreme console the world has ever seen.
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