Hasta La Gadget!

It’s a little sad when the world’s largest production OLED television measures just 15-inches diagonally but that’s the unfortunate state of the panel business at the moment. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of fans (including us) waiting for LG’s EL9500 OLED television to ship outside of South Korea. According to OLED-Display, LG hopes to bring the flat-panel wonder to the US sometime in the middle of 2010. Of course, it’ll still cost somewhere around $2,500 by the time it lands but hey, at least you’ll have the option for local retail and support.

LG’s 15-inch OLED TV on track for mid-year US release originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We told you Panny had some crazy low black levels in its 2010 plasmas, didn’t we? Well, say hello to the retail products and their first price tags, both predictably found in Japan. The Viera G2 series is arriving within a few short weeks — February 5 to be precise — and will be headed by the 50-inch TH-P50G2, which is joined by 46- and 42-inch options. All panels boast Full HD resolution, have three ports each for HDMI and Composite cables, and are expected to cost ¥320,000, ¥260,000, and ¥220,000, respectively. That roughly equates to $3,500 for the whopper and $2,400 for the smallest family members, which when you think about that mercurial five million to one contrast ratio sounds almost like a bargain. If you can tolerate a measly 2,000,000:1 contrast, Panasonic is also announcing some more affordable S2 panels (pictured after the break), which you can have for as little as $2,100 in US money for the 42-inch variety. More machine translation-mangled information can be found in the links below.

Continue reading Panasonic Viera G2 HDTVs boast 5,000,000:1 native contrast ratio, coming soon

Panasonic Viera G2 HDTVs boast 5,000,000:1 native contrast ratio, coming soon originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toshiba may have announced a few things today at CES, but its press event was all about one major product: Cell TV. From what we can gather, the company is hopping on this bandwagon in a way we haven’t seen since it sank its teeth into HD DVD, and if all the claims pan out, you just might be looking at your next television. Details were short on future pricing and availability, but we get the idea that Tosh wants this on the market as soon as humanly possible. Reportedly, this thing will enable 2D-to-3D conversion of practically any content you watch; of course, we’ve seen content that was shot in 3D look awful when behind the glasses, so we’re not counting on the quality of the metamorphosis to be anything mind-blowing. That said, having such a chip within a TV opens up a whole new world of possibilities, and the accompanying uber-box shown in the gallery below is likely to sell right alongside of it. The purpose? To connect your “entire home” with your HDTV, not to mention bringing web content, video calling and stellar image quality to your otherwise drab den. Needless to say, we’re on pins and needles here waiting for more information, but we’ll be sure to pass it on as soon as it becomes available.

Toshiba’s Cell TV hands-on at CES originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Disney and Apple — now, where have we heard about these two mingling in content related activities before? Sure enough, whispers of a potential tie-up regarding a $30 per month TV service for iTunes are turning into more of a gentle roar, with The Wall Street Journal reporting today that both CBS and Walt Disney Company are “considering participating in Apple’s plan to offer television subscriptions over the internet.” Naturally, this comes from those ever present (and perpetually undisclosed) “sources,” but considering that the outfit just shelled out for Lala, we wouldn’t put anything past it. As the story goes, CBS is considering offering up content from CBS and CW, while Disney could include programming from ABC, Disney Channel and ABC Family networks; details on the purported program are obviously still under wraps, but we know that both of these guys would be looking for some sort of monthly compensation in exchange for access to their lineups. Whatever the case, it’s being bruited that Apple could complete licensing deals and introduce the service sometime in 2010, so we’ll be keeping an ear to the ground for more.

Disney and CBS interested in Apple’s subscription-based iTunes TV idea? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 05:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already seen Seagate tout the speed advantages of its SATA 6Gbps hard drive, but it’s the 6Gbps SSD that we’re really curious about. PC Perspective managed to snag itself a Marvell prototype drive, and even though they could only test the read capabilities of it, the results are nothing short of titillating. Reviewers pitted the Marvell drive against Intel’s well-respected X25-M G2, and their (admittedly limited) testing led them to discover a 33 percent increase in burst performance over one of the quickest SSDs on the market today. In case you’re still not impressed, you should know that they also saw a 27 percent uptick in sustained read performance (compared to the X25-M G2) and a 175 percent increase over the aforementioned SATA 6Gbps Seagate HDD. Obviously it’s still too early to tell whether the 6Gbps SSD really is the best thing since the vacuum tube, but if these ultra-early results are any indication of what’s to come, we suggest you start packing those pennies away right now to finance your next storage upgrade.

Prototype SATA 6Gbps SSD gets benchmarked: yessir, it’s hasty originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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