Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve had only tantalizingly brief (or is it briefly tantalizing?) chances to see LG’s glorious OLED television, but each and every time it’s left us with the feeling that our lives are poorer for not having one in our homes. Sure, that says as much about our tech addiction as it does about the 3mm-thick displays, but at least the deep-pocketed among us won’t have to wait too much longer to sate the need for 10,000,000:1 contrast ratios and 0.001ms response times. LG has announced it’ll be bringing it’s 15-inch OLED panel to Europe this May (to be swiftly followed by summer availability in the US) with a hefty MSRP sticker of €1,999 ($2,725) for the Austrian market. Nobody ever said the cutting edge was gonna be a cheap place to live.

LG’s 15-inch 15EL9500 OLED TV sets sail for Europe, scheduled to arrive this May originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink OLED-Display  |  Email this | Comments

Hey, didja hear the news? PMA is just about upon us, giving all the camera makers a perfect opportunity to refresh their lineup. In no particular order, here’s what Samsung is providing, all set for a Spring 2010 release:

• New HMX-U15 ($230) and HMX-U20 ($250) 1080p HD pocket camcorders shoot H.264 and feature HDMI out, image stabilization, a 2-inch LCD, and some simple edit options. The U20 also throws in a 3x optical zoom and 10 megapixel stills, while the U15 instead takes 14 megapixel stills.
• The TL500 is a 10 megapixel camera with 24mm ultra-wide angle lens with an articulating three-inch AMOLED display, perfect for spying around the corner. It supports RAW format, shoots VGA video, and is due out for a hair less than $450.
• The 10 megapixel TL350 claims 1080p HD video recording with a maximum speed of up to 1,000 frames per second — which invariably drops the video resolution to 138 x 78, but hey, sacrifices must be made. The three-inch AMOLED display and look for it set you back about $350.
• A pair of 12 megapixel point-and-shoots for the lower end, the waterproof AQ100 ($200) and the “scratch resistant” SL605 ($130), both with 2.7-inch LCDs and 5x optical zoom. The former shoots video in 720p and the latter just VGA.

Plethora of pressers after the break, and we’ll be catching our flight to Anaheim shortly to give hands on impressions and take pictures of cameras that’ll put our DSLRs to absolute shame.

Continue reading Samsung’s PMA gifts: HD pocket camcorders, point-and-shoots with AMOLED screens

Samsung’s PMA gifts: HD pocket camcorders, point-and-shoots with AMOLED screens originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Barcelona — It may not look like much, but the Armada chipset from Marvell could totally change what your cellphone can do. Based on the ARM v7-spec chip, the Armada 618 also packs in enough graphics hardware to power a home cinema and gaming rig at the same time, all while staying cool and merely sipping battery power.

I caught up with the Marvell guys at the Mobile World Congress, and saw this little box hooked up to a pair of screens. One, which you see above, was running a hi-res 3D video game. The other screen was a huge TV set showing an HD movie.

The Armada is designed to be used in the next generation of smart phones, and will be available later this year. The numbers are impressive. The chipset can drive up to four 2K x 2K resolution displays at the same time, which means it sniffs at mere 1080p, and the 3D-engine can render up to 45 million triangles per second. It will turn your phone into a full-on movie and gaming machine.

The Armada 618 will work with Linux, Android, and Windows Mobile, and even has enough power to run Adobe’s Flash. And of course, its not just limited to phones. The Armada could power an HD netbook and put Intel’s Atom to shame.

Armada 618 [Marvell]

In case you haven’t noticed, Mobile World Congress is upon us, and you can bet that Samsung is here in a big way. The outfit is kicking things off with a couple of low-key releases: the S5K4E2 and S5K5CA CMOS image sensors. The former is a 5 megapixel chip that utilizes Samsung’s own Enhanced Energy Steering technology and can capture video at up to 15 frames per second. We’re told that it’s also pretty darn good at reducing noise, and better still, it can slip into some of the slimmest and smallest handsets this world has ever seen. Moving on, there’s the S5K5CA SoC imager, a 3 megapixel chip that combines both the image signal processor (ISP) with the CMOS image sensor. As the story goes, this one’s some 25 percent smaller than prior 3 megapixel chips and the 720p video capture capabilities aren’t too shabby, either. Both slabs are expected to hit mass production later this year, so go ahead and get ready to break the bad news to your existing cameraphone now. It’s better this way, we promise.

New Samsung chips bring HD image sensors to slimmer, smarter mobiles originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Business Wire  | Email this | Comments

Our Intel Arrandale / Clarkdale review bonanza was sprinkled with a few graphics benchmarks, but there was never a concerted effort to break down the specific upgrades on the 45nm GPU that comes as part of the new CPU package. That omission has now been corrected by Bit-tech, who’ve delved deep into the murky waters of embedded graphics and report that Intel’s focus appears to have been firmly on video playback. Noting full bitstreaming, (our HD editors inform us that’s a big deal), Blu-ray with picture-in-picture, and HDMI 1.3a support, the lads commended the “very smooth” 1080p playback of h.264-encoded video. While their conclusion about gaming was less glowing — finding that Intel’s latest gen only keeps up with older hardware — they couldn’t help but recommend the new processors on account of their feature-rich video playback and energy efficiency. More benchmarks at the source link.

Intel GMA HD graphics review deems them excellent for video, mediocre for gaming originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Bit-tech  | Email this | Comments