Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment

We could hardly believe the audacity when LG first started touting its Chocolate hand held projector, but now that they’ve played down the cross-branding — it’s just known as the HS101 now — and rounded out a few more of the specs, we’re beginning to see the light. The teensy, 1.7 pound LED DLP projector runs at a 2000:1 contrast ratio, with 800 x 600 pixels at a standard 4:3 ratio. The LED is rated at 20,000 hours, which means an end to extravagant bulb purchases. There are of course those soft-touch keys, and a lot of black all over, but we won’t begrudge LG those little Chocolate nods. Inputs include DV, D-Sub and DVI, and the projector will be available worldwide for 799 Euros ($1090 US).

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: HDTV

Yesterday there was Monster Cable’s Speed-Rated HDMI cables and today, Honeywell’s CURxE self-healing cable. Sounds like someone in the marketing department decided that the error correcting built into the HDMI spec wasn’t good ‘nough and told the engineers to incorporate a little chip into the cable. Of course brightly colored LEDs were added to help potential suckers justify the extra expense. The last set of enhanced HDMI cables we reviewed, equipped with LEDs and “chips” didn’t help the picture at all; it made the picture worse. We don’t know how much these HDMI cables are going to retail for or when they are going to be available but honestly, even if we did, we highly doubt anyone would rush out and pick a set up. We have a bad feeling with CEDIA right around the corner, this is only the beginning of off the wall, greed-driven HDMI marketing.

UPDATE: Link now directs to the offical Honeywell PR – more info to come.

[Via Electronic House]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

In addition to announcing its “low-end” BDP-S300 will be pond-skipping to Europe, at IFA today Sony also announced its latest Blu-ray player, the BDP-S500. Before we start in, and it’s neither here or there, but didn’t Sony notice that “S500” is the most common consumer electronics model name around? It’s the John Smith of tech, if you will. (See: Sony’s other S500 and S500, Nikon’s S500, Samsung’s S500, Canon’s S500, Casio’s S500, etc.). That aside, we can find little about this new player that differs from the BDP-S300: both feature HDMI (duh), 24p, and x.v.Color, and Dolby Digital Plus — only the S500 has Dolby True HD and DTS-HD1, and HDMI 1.3. Is that worth £200 (about $400) more to you? If so, both will be out overseas by the end of October and run you £400 and £600 ($800 and $1200 US), and even come bundled with the Spider-man trilogy in the UK.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Displays

LG is touting its fancy new Digital Fine Contrast tech today, which gives it a new “world’s highest” contrast ratio, at 5000:1. And who are we go argue with numbers like those? LG is planning to implement the tech into all of its monitors, except for the M8W, L18, L196WS and Fantasy Series. Along with the existing displays getting the DFC boost, LG has two new displays sporting the tech: the 20-inch USB-based L206WU pictured — which showed up in the States last month — and the 22-inch L227WT. The latter display includes Wide Color Gamut tech for showing off 100 percent of the NTSC spectrum, and a 2ms response time. The L206WU will be out globally in October, while the L227WT will hit the scene in November. No word on prices.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Good story on computer forensics and open source tools used.