Audio/video

New eBook Reader Features Ground-breaking Technology and Access to More Than 10,000 Titles

NEW YORK, Sept. 26, 20063/4 The wish of avid readers and technology buffs is coming true today with the debut of the highly-anticipated Sony® Reader Portable Reader System.

Available today direct at sonystyle.com for those who can’t wait, the Reader will also be on retail shelves next month, just in time for holiday gift giving.

Sony today also announced the premiere of its CONNECT® eBook store. Agreements with a number of major publishing companies have made more than 10,000 eBook titles available to download to the Reader via the companion PC software.

And for a limited time, when a Reader is registered on the CONNECT site, people will receive a $50 credit towards the purchase of any available eBook titles which can now be reviewed online at ebooks.connect.com.

“Today, we’re writing a new chapter in digital technology for reading,” said Ron Hawkins, Sony Electronics’ vice president of Portable Reader Systems marketing. “Easy and enjoyable to use, the Reader fulfills the promise of electronic reading in a way that no other device has been able to do.  Not intended to replace traditional books, but to supplement them, the Sony Reader allows people to take a library of books and other reading material with them wherever they go.”

Starting in October, book fans will find the Reader on shelves at SonyStyle stores located in high-end fashion malls throughout the country as well as at about 300 Borders® stores, including Borders airport locations. Borders, the exclusive bookstore retail partner for the Reader during the upcoming holiday season, will also sell pre-paid cards for eBook downloads on the CONNECT service.

Widespread Publisher Support

New publishers working with Sony to provide titles for Reader through the Sony Connect eBook store include: Hyperion, McGraw-Hill Professional, Cambridge University Press, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, National Geographic, Kensington Publishing and Regnery Publishing, among others.  These firms join Penguin-Putnam, Simon and Schuster, Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group USA and Holtzbrinck Publishers along with TOKYOPOP, whose commitment to providing titles for Reader was announced earlier this year.

“Our collaboration with publishers will be a key factor in growing the popularity of eBooks,” said Lee Shirani, vice president for eBooks at Sony CONNECT.   “We look forward to working closely with publishers to offer consumers an increasing breadth and depth of title selections; great value; and ease of use in discovering, downloading and reading new titles on the Sony Reader.”

The Sony Reader couples an innovative electronic paper display with simple on-screen controls and stylish design. Travelers can carry as much as they want to read whether they are traveling across the globe or just around the corner.  With battery life equivalent to roughly 7,500 continuous page turns, readers can potentially devour multiple bestsellers such as “Marley & Me” by John Grogan, “I Feel Bad About my Neck” by Nora Ephron, “Ricochet” by Sandra Brown and “War and Peace” without having to recharge.

The Reader’s high-resolution electronic paper display delivers a realistic print look that rivals traditional paper and results in crisp text and graphics that are easy on the eyes and readable even in bright sunlight.

In addition to electronic books the Reader can also store and display personal documents in Adobe PDF format, RTF, text and JPEG photos. From the CONNECT eBook store, you can also download via your PC selected RSS feeds from blogs and news sites free-of-charge. Feeds from popular sites such as Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, engadget and Gizmodo among others are available right from the start.

Pricing and Availability

The Sony Reader will retail for about $350 and comes complete with USB cable, a wall charger, the CONNECT Reader software and a protective soft cover.  The Reader and optional accessories such as colorful leather covers and a charging cradle will be available through www.sonystyle.com, SonyStyle stores, Borders stores and authorized retailers nationwide. More information about Sony Reader is available at www.sony.com/reader.

Social responsibility has always been writ large at Bosch. Franz Fehrenbach, Chairman of the Board of Management, has now documented this fact in a letter written to Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations: Bosch has now joined the UN Secretary-General’s “Global Compact” initiative, which he suggested at the World Economic Forum in 1999 and which was launched one year later.

The purpose of the Global Compact is to enact social standards to accompany the process of globalization. To date, more than 1,700 members have joined the network. Aside from UN organizations, these include companies, economic associations, trade unions, and human rights organizations. The members of the initiative undertake to comply with the Global Compact’s ten principles and to promote their universal implementation. These principles include compliance with international human rights, the outlawing of child labor, forced labor, and compulsory labor, observance of equality of opportunity in employment, compliance with environmental standards and combat against corruption.

Signing up to the Global Compact, Franz Fehrenbach commented: “The Global Compact corresponds with the principles according to which we do business, and which are reflected in our Bosch values.” It was only at the beginning of April this year that the Board of Management and associate representatives of the Bosch Group documented their common basic principles of social responsibility in a joint declaration. By signing the Global Compact, Bosch is making this commitment known to an international audience.

Getting an early look at the brand new HD DVD movie players from Toshiba last week stands out as one of the best perks this perk-blessed technology reviewer has enjoyed for a great long while.

Up front, this is pretty expensive stuff as the long-awaited high-definition DVD players reach the marketplace and even as outfits like Toshiba continue to feud with rivals like Sony over which format to employ.

The Toshiba product I will cover, the company’s spectacular $2,999 (suggested retail) Qosmio G35-AV650 portable computer, uses a format called HD DVD while Sony and allies proffer players in a format called Blu-ray. The 2 formats are incompatible. If you wanna play, you gotta take sides.

This conflict over the formats for these great new DVDs threatens to put early adopters in the same bind that we encountered three decades ago when Sony’s Betamax eventually gave way to the VHS videotape format.

So it’s a real shame that these modern guys can’t learn to play well with the other children either, because the new products deliver blow-your-socks-off movie watching.

Toshiba’s demo unit came with a promotional disc with trailers for recent action-movie hits, including “King Kong,” “Sahara,” “Serenity,” “Batman Returns” and “Doom.”

There also was a clip in which a split screen displays a regular DVD playing on one side of a digital TV and an HD DVD playing on the otherside.

The movie clips were mighty persuasive but the best part of the pitch was a segment showing a castle with tourists approaching along a gravel embedded pathway under a cloudless blue sky. The scene was beautiful enough on the conventional DVD side but, as the narrator explained, the HD DVD’s display alongside was like putting on a new pair of eyeglasses. The conventional high-quality display suddenly seemed slightly out of focus–hazy is a good word.

By contrast, the HD DVD shot showed every rock in the gravel pathway and every crack in the castle’s brick facade. Subjectively, it seemed better than my living room HD plasma television set.

The clips, which it’s well to remember were selected for the purpose of showing off, included a Greek cruise ship started in the relatively hazy but still spectacular regular display on the right and moved across the line into the HD DVD display. As it crossed the line I could suddenly see things like dents in the hull, rust splotches and even spots on the painted vessel name where the artist colored a tad outside the lines.

To continue this rapturous description, I need to address the simulated surround sound Dolby 5.1 audio part of the show.

A set of Harman Kardon speakers built into the case of Toshiba’s Qosmio super laptop (10 pounds and 15 1/2 inches wide) make sitting in front of the screen like a good seat in a top movie theater. It did pretty well with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony too.

The jury remains out on whether the added expense for both the DVDs and the players will be deemed worth these delightful experiences right away, but it’s crystal clear that everybody who plays movies at home is going to get an HD player after the companies make peace over formats and when prices drop out of the stratosphere.

The lowest price for a Toshiba HD DVD machine is a dedicated player, the $499 Toshiba HD A1 model. That’s about 5 times more than the going rate for stand-alone dedicated DVD players and there’s a chance that the HD DVD format won’t prevail.

These dragged-out format fights are pretty common wherever inventors and other geniuses do their stuff. It took a decade for the various manufacturers and distributors to accept the single digital standard now used universally in today’s flat-screen plasma and LCD HD television sets. Now we must endure a fight over the DVDs we’ll play on those screens, as well as on top-of-the-line portables like the Qosmio or Sony’s competing Blu-ray Vaio models.

The Qosmio is much more than just a DVD machine, and a lot of folks may find even the $2,999 suggested retail price worth the freight, as I’ll explain.

If ever there was something designed to make a dormitory room habitable, it’s this Qosmio, which includes a 17 1/2-inch (diagonal) screen capable of resolutions of 1920 by 1200 pixels and those already-mentioned superb Harman Kardon built-in speakers. It has a TV tuner as well, and serves like a TiVo on steroids when connected to a cable TV wire.

Parents who worry about sending their offspring into dorms and apartments with expensive and easily misplaced laptops should recall that this machine weighs 10 pounds with a slot for a steel cable lock that can be handcuffed to a radiator or a heavy desk.

If it sounds like I’m shilling a bit heavily for Toshiba, it’s worth remembering that a stand-alone digital television set still costs in the $900 to $2,000 neighborhood. And then there are TiVo costs.

The Qosmio boasts a 200-gigabyte hard drive that makes it perfect for storing captured videos along with MP3 and other music files.

Oh yes, with a 2 gigahertz Intel Core Duo processor, it also does homework pretty well.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/technology/

The Panasonic DMR-EZ25 comes equipped with an integrated digital terrestrial tuner ready for the start of the analogue switch-off, now just a couple of years away. It also boasts an HDMI terminal and the technology to upscale standard definition material to high definition quality - a perfect partner for a new HD panel.

Go Digital
An integrated Freeview recorder is an increasingly popular choice for those wanting to upgrade to digital, and benefit from up to an additional 40 TV and 24 radio channels?. The DIGA DMR-EZ25 also has an analogue tuner, rising to the challenge of accommodating both consumers who have adequate Digital Broadcast reception and those who are yet to gear up for strong enough reception.
DMR-EZ25

The Power of HDMI

High definition (10801 720p) Up-conversion with HDMI
By connecting an HDMI cable to your HD ready TV, you can enjoy your DVDs in beautiful high quality pictures on par with that of high definition images. You can also convert other non-HD signals, such as JPEGs from your SD card, to HD level for playback with improved picture quality.

Ultimate ease of use

Super Multi Format Flexibility
The DMR-EZ25 offers recording onto and playback from ALL DVD disk types. i.e. DVD RAM -R/-RW, +R/+RW, including the new dual layer and 16 x speed -R disks, allowing total freedom of choice and potential to share cherished recordings. In addition to the expected playback of music CDs, the DMR-EZ25 will now playback MP3 and JPEG from both CD R/RW and DVD-R, an additional bonus for those archiving digital photos on their PC.