Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Denon has announced its first real Blu-ray player, with an appropriate assortment of never-before-seen features and price tag to match. The DVD-3800BCI will launch this fall as the first high definition player to include Silicon Optix’s 10-bit Realta HQV video processor, recently seen in Syntax-Brillian’s $10k LCD and the big brother to the Toshiba HD-XA2’s Reon. The first Profile 1.1 Blu-ray player we’ve seen, it supports separate picture-in-picture audio and video streams. Unfortunately, $1,999 isn’t enough to provide an Ethernet port, so any online content will need to be downloaded on a PC and sneakernetted to the player via SD card. Finally, internal decoding for all Blu-ray surround sound formats is included, and it’s the first player with an HDMI 1.3a output, providing enough bandwidth to pass sound natively to a receiver for decoding. Announced but unfortunately unpriced is the DVD-2500BTCI Blu-ray Transport, dropping the advanced audio and video processing for those with their own receivers and scalers. Coming from a company that sells a $3,800 DVD player, the price isn’t too surprising, but we hope there are cheaper (& network-enabled) new Blu-ray options forthcoming.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Digital Cameras, Transportation

It’s been a tick since we’ve seen a new in-car accident recorder hit the market, but just in case none of the previous flavors caught your eye, Clarion’s DRC-3 DriveEye can certainly do the trick. Per usual, this wee camera attaches to your windshield, and when an impact or sudden braking / acceleration is detected, it captures the 20 seconds before and after the event. Moreover, the built-in power backup system ensures that your recordings stay in tact regardless of electronic failures within the vehicle, and just in case you feel like logging a few frames of that Lambo ahead, the manual recording button allows you to indulge. ¥49,800 ($411) gets you the camera, a 128MB CF card, and all the sensors and switches needed to rig this up, but here’s to hoping you never actually need it for legal proceedings.

[Via Switched]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones, Displays

After months of eyelash batting and heavy petting, Microvision and Motorola have officially exchanged vows. In a deal inked yesterday, Motorola has agreed to help Microvision bring their PicoP laser projection technology to market. Not a surprise really what with Microvision’s penchant for using Moto handsets in their marketing collateral. Unfortunately, the agreement looks to amount to the production of a functional prototype only for the time being. While the prospect of an 854 x 480 resolution projection is certainly titillating, we doubt our gadget vanity can withstand the extra chub and battery drain the tech would introduce on our slim, sexy handsets. Then again, the geek cred gained could offset the lack of swank. No worries, we’ve got several months (if not a couple of years) to grow up before product is ready for consumers.

[Via Pocket-lint]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Cheap throw

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

In an attempt to better understand the way in which human babies learn to speak, researchers at Stanford University say they have created a computer program which can learn baby talk. The largely accepted theory about human language is that all of the sounds we make are hard-wired into our brains, but now that James McClelland — a professor at the Palo Alto college — has tested his theory, it would appear that those notions have been debunked. During “training sessions” in both English and Japanese, a computer followed along to recordings of mothers speaking to their children, and was able to pick up the basic vowel sounds as the baby did. “It learns how many sounds there are. It figures that out,” the professor said, he then laughed maniacally and continued, “and once it has learned to speak, it will be trained to sing the most beautiful operas ever written.”

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!