Hasta La Gadget!

Oops! More CES leaks, this time an official press release from Kodak. The company has a few treats in store — a new weather-resistant mini camcorder, and a pair of new stills cameras, clocking in at 10 and 12 megapixels.

All products have two things in common. They have terrible, letter-jumble names, and they are ugly. Really ugly. The Z980 (above) is the 12MP still camera. Stoundout features are the detachable vertical grip with second shutter release and a 24x optical zoom complete with image stabilization (for when you actually use that zoom). Price: $400, plus a few bucks for the paper bag to cover its ugly face.

The ZX1 is the name for the new ruggedized videocam, seen below. This toughened version of Kodak’s Zi6 will shoot 720p hi-def video at 60fps, save it to an SD card and do the whole thing on AA batteries. The Flip competitor is, however, even uglier than the Z980, somehow managing to riff on both the original 1980s Cylons plus Kitt from Knight Rider and still get it wrong. It will at least be cheap, at $150.

Kodak Z980, M380 and Zx1 [Photography Bay]

Stuff.tv has the heads up on two more members of LG’s 2009 lineup, the LH5000 and LF7700. The LF7700 LCD should fit the bill for anyone needing an alternative to Panasonic’s TX-37LZD81, with integrated FreeSat support, while a plasma version will follow later in the year. If 100Hz isn’t enough and 480Hz is too much, the LH5000 drops 200Hz TruMotion tech on European heads later this year. No price or size info for either, but hopefully all this new kit will slightly make up for a Netflix-less existence suffered by our people across the Atlantic.

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

LG previews two new UK-bound LCDs originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re all for taking lemons and making lemonade, but at least clean up the mess before you showcase it to the world. All kidding aside (sort of…), Sir Bibin and Nick Lee found something better to do with their jacked up PowerBook G4 Titanium than fetch a few pennies on eBay. When the hinges finally cracked, they decided to just fold ‘er on over, epoxy a pair of totally lackluster speakers on the side and add a wired Apple keyboard in to create a makeshift PowerMac (er, iMac, we suppose). Truthfully, we’d be way more into this if not for that very apparent spitball and the circa 1991 telephone cluttering up the masterpiece, but you know what they say about an artist and his / her studio.

[Thanks, Michael and Nick]

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

PowerBook G4 Titanium inelegantly modded into desktop originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While Samsung’s latest may be slightly narrower, JVC swears its CES prototype will be the lightest 32-inch LCD out, weighing a mere 5kg its perfect for ceiling mounted installations. At 7mm thick they’ve managed to squeeze 1080p resolution and LED backlighting out of 50% of the materials and less mercury used to produce current designs. A hands on should settle the battle of the thin, expect iPhone comparison pics and contentious weigh ins usually reserved for heavyweight bouts this week in Las Vegas.

[Via AV Watch]

Filed under: CES, HDTV, Home Entertainment

JVC 5kg 32-inch LCD to be the lightest, greenest at CES? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Look out, Intel — the whole world’s gunning for you, with both VIA (possibly, anyway) and now Freescale looking to snag a sliver of the netbook CPU pie. Reportedly, the latter company will be debuting a netbook-centric chip at CES this week from its i.MX line. More specifically, the i.MX515 — which is based on the Cortex-A8 core from ARM — will aim for miniature laptops that sit at or below the almost mythical $199 price point. It’s being reported that Freescale will showcase a Pegatron (ASUS spinoff) built netbook in Vegas, though it’s not clear just yet if similar models will actually be available for purchase in the near future. The real kicker, however, is the potential battery life of machines with this here chip installed — we’re talking up to eight hours, though there’s no indication of what size battery pack would be required to reach that goal. It should be noted that the low-power CPUs won’t support Windows at all, so you’ll only see ’em within machines with Linux-based operating systems.

[Via PC World]

Filed under: Laptops

Freescale’s i.MX515 netbook processor promises low cost, long battery life originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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