Hitachi's 1.5 inch ultra-thin LCD TVs are now available in North America. The company is kicking things off with the 42-inch Director's Series Model. For more information, head on over to the full article by clicking on the "read more" link.

After its first-generation Blu-ray camcorder got panned by critics, Hitachi went back to the drawing board and has announced the DZ-BD9H, the company's latest Blu-ray- and HDD-equipped Full HD camcorder. Check the full article for the skinny on this sleek new piece of gadgetry.

Collaborations among big companies are all the craze these days, and in the LCD TV industry, that rule applies too. Consumer electronics giants Hitachi, Panasonic, and Canon are all coming together to push the envelope in LCD technology. What does it take to pull off a pact like this one? Find out in the detailed version.

Excellent mobility and interactive existence as workmate (Hitachi">EMIEW 2), Hitachi's diminutive new robot, crashed into office furniture during a recent demonstration in front of reporters.  The problem apparently stemmed from the EMIEW 2's inability to communicate properly with its Hitachi handler due to interference with its wireless network communication.

More details after the jump!

For the storage-conscious geeks, this may be a dream come true: Japanese computer hardware company Hitachi Ltd succeeded in shrinking one of the basic, important parts in a hard drive, enabling them to increase desktop HD storage capacity amounting to four terabytes. It should be noted that they made an announcement last year that they would manufacture 1TB hard drives by the end of 2006.

One terabyte alone isn't anything to scoff at. Imagine a one terabyte iPod: that's about 250,000 songs, or even 250 hours of high-definition video on the go.

Hitachi said that consumers may look forward to getting devices with 1TB storage by 2011. It's quite a long wait, and considering how fast technology advances we may need even more storage space than what we do right now. There's the storage-consuming high-definition video content, for example.

The storage capacity-increasing technology involves the use of magnetoresistance, which was discovered by two European scientists and consequently won the Nobel Prize in physics.

Hitachi plans to introduce the new technology in Tokyo's Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference.

 

What you see in the image above is a Blu-ray disc, but that's no ordinary Blu-ray disc for you. It's Hitachi's four-layer 100GB Blu-ray put on display at its CEATEC exhibit recently. If you thought the old 50GB Blu-ray packed some serious storage power, this one doubles it. The only thing scarier? You got it: An eight-layer Blu-ray disc which can pack in a whopping 200GB of solid data.

With that kind of storage, entire hard drives could easily be backed up with a single disc, though current writing speeds make the process a pretty tedious one. We're hoping to see more hardware support for today's leading next-generation format.

It was announced by Verbatim and its parent company Mitsubishi Kagaku Media that they will be releasing the world's first Mini Blu-ray Recordable/Rewriteable (BD-R/RE) media.

These disks are three inches in diameter with a storage capacity of 7.5GB. The manufacturers say that it provides one hour of continuous video capture time on a single side at a resolution of 1920x1080i. If you choose to record at 1440x1080i, then you can even get as much as two hours of video capture time. 

The disks will be made available this August in Japan where it will be launched along with the new Hitachi BD-compatible camcorder which uses the said media. North America doesn't have to worry about being left out because Verbatim will also be providing the disks in the U.S. as soon as the new BD-compatible camcorders become available locally.

If that's not enough to make you want it, the disks will also be coated with the proprietary hard-coat finish of the Verbatim BD media which is said to provide "superior anti-static and anti-scratch properties for added protection against scratches, fingerprints and dust particles".

In an interview during Ceatec, a Japanese trade show, Hitachi has announced the development of a Blu-Ray camcorder set to be released in one or two years. They are hoping to release it by this Fall.

For now we only get to see mock-ups. The actual Blu-Ray mechanism is still in development (on paper,) but Hitachi gave an overview of the camcorder's specs. Instead of a 12-inch CD, the camcorder will use an 8-cm CD. While the smaller disc would hold less data, it would still hold a considerable amount considering the 50GB capacity of a standard Blu-Ray disc would still be significantly even when cut down.

The camcorder will also have a "5.3 megapixel CMOS sensor capable of recording at full 1,920 x 1,080 resolution" and could record "up to 7GB of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video on 8cm BD-RE/R media or 5 times less on 8cm DVD-RAM/RW/R discs."

And in the techie side of things, Blu-ray enthusiasts may want to know that, as CDRinfo reports, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd has just announced a monolayer/dual-layer Blu-ray drive doubling the read and write speed of 2x Blu-ray burners available to 4x, while still keeping power consumption to 130 mW - a 2x burner power maximum.

25 GB of data can be recorded into a monolayer BD-R disc in 23 minutes, while 50 GB burned to a dual-layer BD-R medium may complete in 46 minutes. The drive was developed in accordance with the "Blu-ray Disc Recordable Format Part 1 Version 1.2" standard, released recently by the Blu-ray camp.

And in light of the constant linear velocity drive (CLV), Panasonic will be releasing 25 GB BD-R discs by late July or early August, aimed specifically for the new burner. But reports are also coming in about Hitachi LG's 6x GGW-H20L BD burner which should release this July while talks on Pioneer's front on their own 4x Blu-ray burner.

When it comes to TVs today, bigger is definitely better. With that in mind, it doesn't get any better than Hitachi's latest offerings to the mass market consumers - a 50- and 60-inch Plasma TV capable of showing video at a very impressive 1920x1080.

This achievement was made possible by Hitachi's proprietary technology called Reel60. Explaining the process in detail is quite complicated so here's a short rundown.

Movies today are shown at 24 frames per second while televisions show 60 frames per second. Showing the film directly to TV would therefore cause the movie to stutter. To fix this problem, a conversion technique called 3:2 pulldown correction is used to make the 24 frames of film fit the television's faster 60 frames.

Hitachi's Reel60 is said to accurately and automatically eliminate the jerky motion through the use of interpolated frames based on the original film images. The processing technology smoothen out the movement and correctly matches the original motion. This all translates to better quality and enjoyment from watching movies at home.

The new models will be for sale this August with prices at US$ 8,000 for the 60 inch model and US$ 4,300 for the 50 inch one. Well, no one ever said that bigger costs less right? Still, if you've got that kind of cash to burn, go for it. You'll be a hit at the office come football season.