Gizmodo: ceatec07

JVC Builds 180Hz LCD That Makes 120Hz LCDs Look Like Chumps

Wilson Rothman — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:00:46 EDT

Motion blur is a problem in LCDs, and until now, the best solution was 120Hz processing: double the frames, and the blur tends to subside. JVC looked at the situation and said, if doubling works okay, then how 'bout we triple it? This week, at CEATEC, the result was on display. Little is known about this smooth operator—which is a 768-line 720p set and probably just a little bit warm to the touch—but my guess is we're going to be hearing a lot more about 180Hz in the months to come. [Tech-On]

Update: E-Paper Phone from DoCoMo Has Ever-Changing Keys

Wilson Rothman — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 10:07:26 EDT

Remember that "e-ink" phone we showed you yesterday? We just got the details and better pics. It's a DoCoMo prototype hard-keypad phone that actually uses e-paper from SiPix, not e-ink, to change the meaning of the keys.

E-paper works slightly differently than Sony Reader's e-ink, which has black and white balls of opposite charges, floating in a clear liquid, which change position when polarity changes. Here, the particles are just white, and are suspended in a colored liquid, floating up when needed. Engineers have come up with five e-paper colors—blue, red, green, yellow and black—and the prototype plastic bodies are meant to correspond with those colors. It takes about one second for the display character to change.
There doesn't appear to be any kind of a backlight, so you may have to carry your own Itty Bitty Book Light around to see what buttons you are pushing, which sort of defeats the purpose of having hard keys. There doesn't appear to be a halitosis monitor either, but surely that will come in time. [Nikkei]

Pioneer SE-CLX9 Are Batman's Earphones of Choice

Wilson Rothman — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:40:36 EDT

Pioneer just debuted these gorgeous aluminum SE-CLX9 in-ear earphones at CEATEC. Not only are they high-performance 'buds capable of a drum-shaking 105dB, but they come with different nozzles that physically alter the equalization, from "high tune" to "standard" to "bass tune." Best of all, every option is nestled in the OCD-organized utility pack, so there aren't a lot of loose pieces rolling around on the floor of your Batmobile. [Akihabara News; Pics from ASCII]

Panasonic DMR-BW900 Blu-ray Recorder Writes to 50GB Dual Layer Discs or a TB of HDD

Brian Lam — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:50:45 EDT

Recording 18 hours of 1080p on a single disc is pretty serious stuff, and Panasonic Blu-ray recorders launched at CEATEC Japan do this. They do this via a digital TV tuner, MPEG 4 compression and support for 50GB dual layer discs you'd see on a PC recorder, but never before on a home theater box. The players also have HDDs in them, up to $2600 for a 1TB model (there are five other lesser models, too, and the phrase product spam comes to mind). The terabyte drive can do 381 hours of recording, but using that lowest setting for 1080p seems perverse and wrong. Transferring from HDD to disc can be done at 4x. Japan only, for now, and given the high-endness of this setup and American HDMI DRM, maybe forever. [PC World]

Mitsubishi Debuts a 140-Inch LED Display at CEATEC

AddyDugdale — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 05:49:22 EDT

Behold the Resolia, Mitsubishi's 140-inch display that's been getting Ooh-ed and Aah-ed in Tokyo this week. Full measurements are 120 x 70 x 5.9 inches, but after all the excitement of Sony's OLED goodness yesterday, it leaves us wanting—well — less. [Gizmodo Japan]