Just posting to check the validity of something - was the black 5500 the only black Power Macintosh to come from Apple? as far as I've seen, all the black 5400s were labelled Performa.
I'm curious about one of those little snippets of info that are quite useless in the real world, but interesting all the same, that's all 
Dana
Dana,
The MacTV was all black. Form factor, keyboard, mouse, cables, remote. That's the only other one I know of.
William
www.williamahearn.com
The Australian black 54/5500's were labeled "Director's Edition" also or something close to that. Director's something.....
I have three black PowerPC Macs that are also labelled Power Macintosh 5500/250 on the usual press-in. Three identical Macs probably rule out the possibility of a passing error. Although the model is often referred to as a DE, none is so labelled.
The sole DIRECTOR'S EDITION (sic) Mac that I have is also labelled PowerPC, and on the insert Macintosh Performa 5400/180.
All were sourced in Australia. Dana's snippet appears to be a genuine nugget.
de
That matches with what I've seen, aye - Black 5400 Director's Editions labelled both Performa and DE, while Black 5500s were labelled Power Macintosh ( http://www.danamania.com/temp/darthmac.jpg ), and had the DE hardware but without the DE printing on the case
http
EveryMac mentions the black Performa 5400/180DE, but it seems that base configuration included an A/V card, but no TV tuner card. The black 5500/250 gets no mention.
Only one of my four came with a PAL TV tuner, and these are now hard to come by, although I have found two more. I turfed the modems, replaced them with CS II 10Base-T and 10/100Base-T NICs, installed two-port PCI USB cards, Sonnet L2 G3 400MHz processors and 64MB EDO RAM cards. By far the hardest component to get hands on is the black mouse, known to its intimates as Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II, M2706. Even the black AppleDesign Keyboard, M2980, is easier to find.
de
black Apple ][+
I didn't know that not all black 5500s came with a TV tuner. Mine came with the works, though the first thing I did with it when it arrived was strip everything out and put the 6500/300 board (from my existing 6360 server) into it, along with the 6360s hard drive.
It instantly booted up and took over web/mail/everything serving from the 6360 :). I've not touched the hardware since. Someday a CSII card may go into it and it can do the router thing too - but like all possible old mac projects, that can wait until I get around to it!
Dana
But I got the sense from one of the posts in the thread on MacTalk that a PAL tuner was standard in the black ('DE') 5500/250s. You probably saw it, too. I haven't laid hands (or electronic fingers) on the Service Source manual, if there was one for what must have been a niche run of the machines, for the black 5400/5500s. Both tuner and AV card are only optional on the beige machines, according to their SS manual.
de