Filed under: Displays, HDTV

It’s a dilemma faced by nearly every photo / video editor on the planet — stick with a huge CRT for that precise color accuracy, or make the jump to LCD for aesthetics sake? Fret not, dear worriers, as Panasonic has supposedly crafted a miracle solution with the BT-LH1760. This April-bound production monitor is essentially devoid of attractiveness, but it does offer up a 120Hz refresh rate, an IPS panel with a 1,280 x 768 native resolution and “faithful color reproduction with twice the response speed of other currently available professional LCD monitors.” Furthermore, you’ll find a built-in waveform monitor and vectorscope, pixel-to-pixel matching capabilities and a slew of inputs including DVI, auto-switching HD-SDI / SDI, component and VGA. Yeah, it’s a pretty impressive array of specs for a 17-incher, but then again, most 17-inchers don’t demand just under five large, either.

[Via BroadcastBuyer]

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Ricoh has widened its range, dropping all new compact snapper with a massive 7.1x wide-angle zoom.

The all new R8 is the successor to the R7, and comes in the wake of a slew of new peepers offering punters ever-wider angles to take their holidays snaps.

Olympus’s SP-570 offers 20x zoom, but in a far heftier bod’ that it’d be rude to call compact. This new Ricoh model is far better suited if you’re a snap and go type photographer like us.

You’ll get 28 to 200mm from the R8, with 10-meg, snap focus and a 2.7-inch screen slapped on the back so you can see exactly what you’ve taken, whether it’s a super close up, or a vast panoramic.

Looks wise, we’re not talking Lily Cole: but then this bad boy makes your current digital memory box look pretty damn obsolete.

Price and release date are still to be confirmed, but keep it here for news as we get it.

This 19-incher comes with two noteworthy quirks: a huge speaker module delivering sound quality as meaty and tasty as a half-pound cheeseburger; and built-in recording courtesy of an external hard disk. This connects up via USB and, while that isn’t the most elegant option — actually building it into the TV’s body would look way better — it does mean it can be hooked up to a PC and loaded up with MP3s for playback via the telly. Which is nice, if you like the idea of listening to music through your television. It also means you can back up your TV recordings on your PC, although we predict that’s a feature that’ll be used by approximately .0001 percent of the people who buy this telly.

Picture quality from the built-in Freeview is brilliantly crisp and clean, with good motion handling in games. There’s an HDMI socket for lashing up hi-def gear, although the screen’s a bit too tiny to make that truly worthwhile. On the audio side, the beefy speakers mean sonic performance is way better than it should be on such a small telly.

On the design and styling front, we’d be lying if we said this was much of a looker, but it’s not the most hideous set around either, despite the hulking speakers ‘neath the screen. We reckon it might be the perfect second screen for the kitchen worktop or bedroom.

In what’s now becoming a weekly ritual, Apple took their online store down this morning and has returned, with an all new version of the dinkiest iPod, the Shuffle.

The new version looks just like its older sibling, but packs 2GB instead of 1. So now you can stick on 500 songs for when you’re out jogging or just posing with the nipper clipped on your jacket.

It costs £45, with the 1GB reduced to a ludicrously affordable £32. Pretty good value for a much-loved jukebox

We’re expecting more Apple announcements next Tuesday, with the iPhone SDK top of our wish list.

Good old Auntie is really coming up trumps with this whole downloading telly thing. With iPlayer a rip roaring success, the BBC has just announced they’re sticking a ton of shows onto iTunes too.

You can head over to Apple’s online emporium now and download the likes of The Mighty Boosh, Little Britain and Life on Mars straight to your lappie.

The move means you can finally get the best of British onto your ‘Pod without having to fart around ripping DVDs or running the risk of increasingly dodgy BitTorrent sites.

The plan is to continually update the service, offering programmes after they’ve been made available via iPlayer. This means we’ll be able to take the delectable Keeley Hawes and Ashes to Ashes on the tube of a morning. Nice.

Apple and the Beeb are already said to be working on bringing a full version of iPlayer to Apple TV, but in the meantime this is a more than welcome addition to the current raft of trashy US shows available.

Shows will cost £1.89 a pop. This should hopefully tide us over until Apple gets it together to deliver a decent number of Stateside shows and movies onto the UK service.