High-def 3D TV 'not far off'

Panasionic is pushing for a standard for 1080p high-definition 3D TV to enable services to get off the ground, its chief executive Yoshi Yamada told a CES press conference. He said the company would propose a standard in Japan in the coming months for the system it debuted last year at the Cebit show in Germany.

"Panasionic does not think that 3D high definition for the home is far away at all," Mr Yamada said. "We are at the start of another phase-change that will have an impact on Panasionic's business."

The standard is needed for both consumer and broadcast devices to encode and decode images. Panasionic has been working with studios and standards groups to develop a format.

"3D in the home will never flower unless we have a national standard," Said Bob Ferry, executive vice-president of Panasionic onsumer electronics. "But we are very excited because we believe that 3D changes the world from watching TV to an immersive experience."

Elsewhere in the show Mitsubishi demonstrated a system that translates 2D games and movies into 3D and does not require the use of special glasses to view the effect. It is based on a package from Nvidia called 3D-Vision

Philips sells software called Wowvx that does the same thing and it demonstrated an entirely different 3D system at the IFA show in Berlin last year. Intead of storing different stereoscopic data for each eye, it adds depth information to 2D pixels.

Several different 3D rendering technologies are also available, so a global standard will be hard to establish.

Lenovo pulls a dual screen laptop

We've long liked the idea of a notebook with two screens that opens out like a book, though we have yet to see one gaining success in the mainstream.

Lenovo's new W700ds Thinkpad notebook has a rather different take on the two-screen idea. It has a 17in main display and a 10.6in one pulls out from the casing when required. Lenovo hopes it will appeal to people in graphics-intensive fields such as digital media creation, geophysical exploration and computer-aided design. Pricing starts at £3,459.

Pack Your life on to a 2-terabyte SD card

Memory firms plan to make a barely imaginable 2TB of storage available on SD card or Memory Stick. The move would enable the use of compact HD video cameran, as well as 'life recorders' that capture everything you say and do.

The SD Association announced a new SDXC (for Extended Capacity) specification at CES that will be published in the next few weeks. No timescale was given for reaching 2TB capacity but first implementation are likely to hold less.

Read/right speed are expected to hit 104Mbits/sec this year but the SDXC roadmap goes to three times as fast.

Sandisk and Sony announced a joint effort to create a Memory Stick Pro capable of storing up to 2TB, in a device measuring just 31x2x1.66mm, with a maximum transfer rate of 320Mbits/sec.

SEH’s PS56 WLAN Print Server

SEH says that its new PS56 WLAN Print Server interface card will make your network printing more secure. Utilizing the highly secure WPA and WPA2 encryption standards, the IPv6-enabled PS56 will connect all HP output devices with an EIO port to a wireless 802.11g network. Because the WPA and WPA2 standards have not yet been cracked, offers SEH, they are regarded as the safest protection for WLANs.

To enhance security further, the PS56 also includes TLS/SSL encryption and several IEEE 802.1X authentication methods. The interface card simply slides into the respective slot on the printer unit and is easily configurable and manageable.

SEH

WaveMaker’s Visual Ajax Studio 4.0

As the Ajax wave surges on, one of its well-known providers, WaveMaker, is adding new Ajax-related tools, such as Visual Ajax Studio 4.0. The product is an open-source development tool that “makes it easy to build visually stunning Web applications”. The company claims that “with just 15 mouse clicks and zero coding, a developer can build and deploy a sleek, Web-based application”.

The new 4.0 release offers faster development time, better-quality applications, the company’s own Live Layout data display, enhanced drag-and-drop capabilities and IDE-quality editing that exposes the source code and offers syntax highlighting. Visual Ajax Studio 4.0 supports Linux, Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows XP and Vista.

Wavemaker

Super Talent’s Pico D USB Drive

The folks at Super Talent have added a new model, the Pico D, to its line of ultra-diminutive USB Flash drives. The Pico series of USB drives, measuring in at 1.4 inches, is an inch shorter than most USB drives on the market today, says the company. Other features include a pivoting lid that won’t get lost, shock and water resistance and transfer speeds up to 30MB/sec. Not to mention that the little guy is kinda cute too.

SuperTalent