Sharp Unveils New LCDs, Projectors and an iPod Rival

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Staying with hard disks, Sharp also has introduced what it has dubbed a ‘personal jukebox recorder’. The HR-GB201 is essentially another rival to the iPod. It has a 20GB hard disk, which Sharp says is good enough for 5,000 songs encoded at 128Kb/sec. MP3 and WMA are supported as well as WAV.

The player measures 63 x 105 z 19mm (w x h x d), and weighs just 157g. There’s a docking cradle for downloading music from your PC using USB 2.0 connectivity. You could also get audio onto the jukebox using the built in microphone or the analogue line-in connection. Battery-life is given at 12 hours. Sharp didn’t give details on pricing but the HR-GB201 will be available in October.

Returning to displays, one of the LCD TVs in Sharp Aquos range, the LC-20B5E, caught our eye. Not for its silver finish or its 20in viewable area but rather for its PCMCIA card slot housed at the left hand side. If you add a storage card to this you can record MPEG4 TV obviating the need to a DVD recorder.

The LC-20B5E is available now and can be found at online retailers for around up £885.

The most impressive product on show however was the forthcoming XV-Z12000 projector. Even at the suggested retail price of £6,995 this would still be considered a mid-range projector by home cinema purists. This is a far beast of a projector that weighs in at 9.4Kg. It uses a Texas Instruments 0.8in DLP HD2+ chip and has a seven-segment 5x speed colour wheel. The resolution is 1,280 x 720 and it’s fully HDTV compatible.

The XV-Z12000 offers a very large number of user adjustable options that the expert user will love getting their teeth into. What was really astonishing about this projector though is the massively high maximum contrast ratio of 5,500:1 taking it to cinema quality levels. This is at the maximum high contrast setting and I can atest to the remarkably impressive image that the projector produces.

The XV-Z12000 is available now.

Links:
www.sharp.co.uk

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