Spring Brings a Shower of New Devices

Spring in Japan is a time of change. It brings the first seasonal winds of the spring, warmer weather, cherry blossoms, and, at least this year in the gadget space, a whole bunch of new products that are likely to spur a few shopping trips over the coming months.

Seiko Epson's Photo PC player wins the coolest product award, adding a large display onto what is essentially a portable hard drive, and producing something that should help many digital photographers. The increasing use of wireless LAN in the consumer electronics space is again highlighted with a couple of new TVs from Sony and Sharp, while a very interesting prototype shown by Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology provides a glimpse into the future.

A Place for Your Photos

If you do a lot of digital photography, especially on the road, Seiko Epson's Photo PC Player P1000 is sure to excite you. It's a portable 10GB hard drive with 3.8 inch VGA quality (480 pixels by 640 pixels) color LCD all in the same case.

That means it's a neat and convenient way to store pictures from memory cards--thus freeing up the cards for further use--while also allowing you to look at the images you have taken on a screen considerably larger than those on most digital still cameras. You could also use it as a quick and easy way to view your favorite shots, or as a digital photo album.

Even cooler, it can hook up to a compatible printer and print out images or archive images onto a USB CD writer drive. Epson plans to put it on sale in Japan in the middle of the year. A price and overseas sales plans have not been worked out yet.

Sony's Cocoon Series

Sony has expanded its "Cocoon" line-up, which currently consists of a hard-drive based video recorder, with a digital recorder and home theater system. The NDR-XR1 is a video recorder with DVD-R/-RW and 80GB hard drive with Internet connection. The DVD drive makes it possible to back up recorded TV contents onto DVDs for archiving while the Internet connection allows access to an online TV guide.

The NAV-E900 and NAV-E600 home theater systems also have an 80GB hard drive and Internet connection. The hard drive can be used to record music CDs that are free of copy protection and television programs, and can also be used to store digital photos.

All products went on sale during April. The NDR-XR1 costs $1,208, the NAV-E900 $958 and the NAV-E600 $699. There are no immediate plans to sell the products overseas.

Building Better Storage

Computer optical drives aren't usually featured here but Hitachi LG Data Storage's GSA-4040B is worth a look because it is the first to be able to handle all types of recordable DVD and CD. There are already some that can do most formats but they usually trip over on support for DVD-RAM. With DVD-RAM being used in a growing range of consumer video recorders and camcorders, support for the format in the drive means it will be easier to edit home-recorded video on a PC.

Hitachi LG expects to begin production in June. The product will be sold to other electronics companies for inclusion in their products so no end-user pricing is available.

Megapixel Cell Phones

It's just over two years since the first cellular telephone with still camera function went on sale in Japan and now users here are about to see the world's first megapixel-class cellular handsets.

NTT DoCoMo has unveiled six handsets that will make up its new 505i series of cell phones and three of them can produce megapixel class images--a roughly three times increase on the best of today's handsets. The phones, from Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, Fujitsu, and Mitsubishi Electric are certainly cool little numbers.

The Sony handset has a main display that twists around, like Motorola's V70, and looks very much like one of the company's Cybershot digital cameras when it is used in photo mode.

Prices and exact availability are yet to be announced and the phones won't work outside of Japan.

A Waterproof Camera

I've never dropped my digital still camera in the bath but I guess it is becoming something of a problem for many users. After Olympus Optical launched its waterproof A?10 Digital camera in January, Casio Computer has come up with a waterproof housing for its popular Exilim line of thin digital still cameras.

The EWC-1 case went on sale in mid-April and costs $83, which is a cheap insurance package for your more expensive Exilim should you be using it in situations where it will get wet. The case protects the camera from water but not pressure and so can be used safely to a depth of around 3 yards.

TV Goes Wireless

You want to get a TV signal from one part of the house to the other, or even just across the living room, and you're considering using cables? How 20th century of you! Sony's KLV-17WS1 is a 17-inch LCD TV that hooks up to a base station using IEEE802.11a wireless technology.

The system, of the same sort used by an increasing number of personal computers, is used to carry a TV signal datastream from your antenna, cable or satellite system, or DVD player to wherever you are in your house. To emphasize its portability, there's even a carrying handle on the top of the set. The set has XGA resolution (1,280 pixels by 768 pixels) and other niceties, such as a D1 input. Sony is also marketing a model with a 15-inch LCD.

Both will go on sale in May in Japan and cost $1749 and $1374 respectively with a companion base station. There are no overseas sales plans for these models.

Just like waiting an hour for a bus and then having two come along at the same time, Sharp has matched Sony with the launch of a flat panel TV that uses wireless to send video from a base station to the Aquos Mobile.

The set has a 15-inch LCD and speakers that stick out of either side almost like large ears, and it will clip off its stand to make it easier to carry around the house. Battery life is between two hours and three hours depending on the brightness setting, so it will last though most movies and soccer matches but fans of baseball, golf, and certainly cricket might find the batteries die before the event is over.

It goes on sale in Japan from May 1 for $1457 and, like Sony, there are no plans to put the set on sale overseas.

Dressed to Impress

The latest member of Olympus Optical's Camedia digital camera range is out to impress with a 10X optical zoom and 4 megapixel class CCD (charge coupled device) image sensor. The camera body is 30 percent smaller in volume than previous models in the series, according to Olympus, and the camera also features the ability to record movies in Motion JPEG format and a macro setting that works from 1.2 inches.

Tele-converter and ultra-wide conversion lenses are also available as optional extras for the camera. It goes on sale in Japan in mid June and is now on sale in many countries around the world, at a cost of around $624.

Get the Picture

Imagine if personalizing the wallpaper on your computer or cell phone was as simple as holding your favorite photo against the screen, pressing a button, and waiting a few seconds for the image to appear on screen. That day may soon be here. Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology unveiled a prototype LCD panel during April that does just that. This is something you won't find in any commercial products yet but nonetheless a very cool piece of technology.

To make the display, engineers at Toshiba began with a 3.5-inch polysilicon TFT LCD, similar to that found in devices such as consumer camcorders, and added image sensors among the display pixels. The display has a resolution of 320 pixels by 240 pixels (QVGA) and the scanner has a resolution of 960 pixels by 240 pixels, which means it can reproduce images of anything laid flat on its surface, in actual size.

Mini Robots

Just imagine a handful of these little critters running around your house. Seiko Epson used the Robodex show to unveil its Monsieur II robot. In Japanese the name is a play on "mushi" which is the word for insect and the French "monsieur" although in translation it loses this double meaning.

It's a Bluetooth-enabled micro robot. The company built them solely to demonstrate its micro technology, which it says comes from years of watchmaking, and has no plans to sell them. That's too bad because a group of these guys running around underfoot could keep a dog or cat busy for hours.