Todays & Tomorrows Technology

Sharp have announced a new range of AQUOS LED-backlit LCD TVs, the LE700 series, ranging in size from 32- to 52-inches. Each offering Full HD 1080p, they use Sharp’s X-Gen LCD panel with 10-bit processing and a dynamic contrast ratio in excess of 2,000,000:1.

The 52-inch and 46-inch sets also have a dejudder function, while all four include 120Hz refresh and 4ms pixel response time. Viewing angles are supposedly 176-degrees, while LED lifespan is expected to be 100,000 hours.

Connectivity includes four HDMI v1.3 ports, two component inputs, integrated ATSC, QAM and NTSC tuners, PC input and RS-232C for custom installations. A USB port allows for photos and MP3s to be played, and there’s also AQUOS Net – aside from on the 32-incher – which brings weather, stock, gaming and news reports to the HDTVs.

All four new HDTVs will be available this month in the US. The 52-inch LC-52LE700UN is priced at $2,799.99; the 46-inch LC-46LE700UN is priced at $2,199.99; the 40-inch LC-40LE700UN is priced at $1,699.99; and the 32-inch LC-32LE700UN is priced at $1,099.99.

Panasonic have announced their latest HDD camcorder, the HCD-HS350. Packed with a 240GB hard-drive and using a 10.6-megapixel 3MOS sensor, the HCD-HS350 also sports an SDHC slot (content with up to 32GB cards) and 12x optical zoom; according to Panasonic, the HS350 can record more than 30 hours of Full HD video.


There’s also optical stabilization, which Panasonic claim is good enough to cut out shakes even at maximum zoom, and the HS350 can record at rates of up to 17Mbps in its highest quality mode. Alternatively, it can record over 40hrs or over 60hrs of 1920 x 1080 footage in 13Mbps or 9Mbps modes respectively.

Focusing uses the touchscreen preview display, tapping to select an object or person to be tracked, and there’s face and scene recognition, automatic low-light accommodation and 5.1 surround-sound recording. According to Panasonic, the HS350 will boot up in 1.9 seconds from powered-off, or 0.6 seconds from standby.

The Panasonic HDC-HS350 will arrive in Japan on July 25th; no word on pricing, nor when we might see it reach the US or Europe.

SlashGear stopped by the Pepcom Digital Experience in New York this week, and caught up with one of the more interesting netbooks on the horizon: Lenovo’s S12. While it may physically resemble one of the company’s previous models, albeit with a larger 12.1-inch display, what makes the S12 really special is the NVIDIA Ion chipset inside. The demonstration – which you can see after the cut – showed silky-smooth simultaneous HD encoding and playback.

In fact, the Lenovo S12 was using its HDMI port to output 1080p content onto a big-screen HDTV while also re-encoding a 1080p clip into an iPhone-friendly format. Both moved on at a fair clip, and the playback was completely smooth and unaffected by the encoding process.

When you consider that the S12 is otherwise pretty much identical to a mainstream netbook today, it’s all the more impressive. As well as Ion there’s a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM and up to 320GB hard-drive, together with WiFi, Bluetooth and an ExpressCard slot. Full specifications are here. The Lenovo S12 with NVIDIA Ion is expected to go on sale this month, priced at $499.99; cheaper models, lacking Ion, will start at $449.99.

When your HDTV is a one-of-a-kind ultrawide 56-inch display with a £4,500 ($7,318) price tag, you’d better hope it rates well in reviews. Thankfully Philips’ indecently broad Cinema 21:9 56PFL9954H does just that; according to TechRadar, the 1080p high-def set delivers “the best aspects of the finest sets” they’ve ever seen.
Coming in for particular praise are the Ambilight Spectra 3 system, which backlights the HDTV with matched LED lighting, plus the straightforward installation and slickly designed UI. Sound is “well rounded, faithful and genuinely muscular” thanks to integrated subwoofers.

Most importantly, though, the image quality is excellent, as long as you’re feeding it a decent source. That needn’t just mean 1080p; the Cinema 21:9 copes admirably with standard definition DVDs, but Freeview is blocky and shows all the artifacts you’d expect. All in all, a stormer of an HDTV; it’s just a shame that the price will put it out of reach of most buyers.

LG and ARM have announced a partnership that will see the former’s HDTVs use the latter’s ARM11 MPCore multicore processor and ARM Mali GPUs. The system will allow for not only high-definition 1080p processing but video-on-demand, voting and polling, games, and e-commerce without the need for a separate set-top box.

ARM’s range of processor and GPU options will allow LG to target different levels of performance and capability to different HDTV price-points. That way, high-end sets could use multiple SMP cores and offer 4x and 16x full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA), 2D and 3D graphics processing and OpenGL ES 2.0 support.

The most obvious benefit to consumers will be straightforward connectivity with a home network, and the ability to view video and other media content on their sets without needing external boxes. LG have not confirmed when the first HDTVs using the ARM CPU/GPU components will be released.

It doesn’t take much to differentiate your netbook, what with most sharing the same hardware, so Pegatron have managed to surprise and delight by slapping Yahoo!, Google, MSN and Skype keys on their Vivid prototype. To be honest, though, they didn’t need to bother: all they needed to highlight was the fact that this is one of the rare machines with NVIDIA’s Tegra chipset.


Spotted at Computex a few weeks back, the Vivid also has a matte-finish display and an integrated battery. The speakers are squeezed into a metal-mesh cylinder in the hinge, and there’s the usual array of audio in/out and USB ports.

The Vivid also runs a full version of FireFox and can play YouTube video. As well as having the long runtime promised by Tegra, it can also output 1080p through the HDMI port. Still no word on when we can see the Pegatron Vivid on shelves; we’re also hoping it’ll come in a few different colors.

Acer subsidiary Gateway have been showing off their all-in-one touchscreen PC, and with a multitouch-capable 23-inch Full HD display it’s certainly no slouch. Unlike touchscreen nettops, the Gateway ZX6800 packs an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR3 memory, and runs Windows 7.
Storage is courtesy of a 3.5-inch SATA-II hard-drive, with capacities varying according to model, plus there’s a discrete graphics card (unspecified), hybrid TV tuner and integrated speakers. Connectivity includes WiFi a/b/g/n, gigabit ethernet and what looks to be an ExpressCard slot.

No word on where we’ll be seeing the Gateway ZX6800 released, though it’s likely to be a European product. Pricing, too, is unconfirmed, but we wouldn’t expect it to come cheaply.

Panasonic have announced US pricing and availability for their HDC-SD10 and HDC-TM10 Full HD camcorders, which we first caught sight of last month. The two models are each described as “the world’s lightest HD camcorders”, as long as you’re only looking at AVCHD models anyway, and record in 1080p to SD/SDHC cards and, in the case of the TM10, an internal 8GB of flash storage.
In addition to HD there’s also an optical image stabilizer, 16x optical zoom and Face Detection. Both also have Intelligent Scene Selection and Pre-Rec, and are controlled by their flip-out touchscreen displays. There’s also AF/AE Tracking, which can ensure a moving subject is kept in focus.

Up to 32GB SDHC cards are supported, which in the case of the TM10 gives a total of 40GB capacity. The Panasonic HDC-SD10 will be priced at $549.95 while the HDC-TM10 will be priced at $599.95. Both will arrive in the US in September.

JVC have announced that their GD-32XI - the world’s slimmest 32-inch LCD display - will go on sale in Japan come August. The screen, announced back at CES in January, measures 6.4mm at its thinnest point, and is capable of displaying 1080p Full HD video.

The GD-32XI has a contrast ratio of 4,000:1 and brightness rating of 400cd/m2. It reportedly manages 100-percent coverage of sRGB colors and 90-percent of Adobe RGB, while cutting the number of necessary parts down by around 50-percent. JVC’s GENNESA image processing tech is also onboard, to reduce motion noise, improve color accuracy and boost still images.

Despite the slender dimensions, JVC still manage to fit a fair few ports onto the GD-32XI. As well as two HDMI sockets there are analog RGB ports, component and composite connections, an RS-232 and speaker terminals. There’s also an SD card slot and USB port, for viewing images and listening to MP3s.

JVC expect most buyers of the GD-32XI to be business and commercial, planning to shift 10,000 sets a year. The 1080p display will be priced at the equivalent of around $2,500.