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I'm a little disappointed with this release... Many of us are breathlessly awaiting an Ericson / sony style crossover, in the hopes of picking up a very stylish, very functional treo mp3 equivalent.

NZ-90 Demo

And for comparison, the NR-70

Fortunately, as with any new Sony release, this should push the price of the rest of their line down a bit... You can charge a premium for the latest and greatest, but you have to back off when you release something later and greater. Let's hope they back away from that black magnesium.

I'm a little disappointed with this release... Many of us are breathlessly awaiting an Ericson / sony style crossover, in the hopes of picking up a very stylish, very functional treo mp3 equivalent.

NZ-90 Demo

And for comparison, the NR-70

Fortunately, as with any new Sony release, this should push the price of the rest of their line down a bit... You can charge a premium for the latest and greatest, but you have to back off when you release something later and greater. Let's hope they back away from that black magnesium.

I've expressed similar sentiment on /. before and got drilled a bit, because Memory Stick has become cost competitive with Smart and Compact. Personally, I use Compact for everything and wouldn't like having to spend the money twice.

I do have some reservations about Sony's quality, as a rising number of reviews are finding problems with Sony's quality. It seems after Akio Morita died the company's focus appears less on innovation and solid quality, more on innovation and maximizing profit drawing on Sony's reputation. I get burned once and I seldom give a second chance. There are so many players in the various tech markets these days.

Has anyone had quality issues with Clié units?

Lastly: This page renders like sh!t in Netscape. How very unprofessional.

Finally, someone on MY side. The last time I made a comment about all the benefits of CRT and the negatives about LCD I got trashed by about twenty Apple dorks.

I agree, the 22" and even more so with the 23" Apple Displays are beautiful displays. But not for what Apple is trying to sell them for, and definitely not for the price. I am the sys admin for an advertising agency in Little Rock, Arkansas - I buy all 21" Sonys for my artists and they absolutely love them. I'd get them the 24" if my budget were twice as big ...

And actually I've been under the impression that Sony made Apple's displays all along - back to the days of the beige 21" Apple Studio Display. Without doing actual research I stumbled onto this Sony display which happens to be a 23" LCD with the exact same specs as Apple's HD Cinema Display I pretty much knew they were the same thing. Guess what, Sony's is $500 cheaper. Only difference is the Apple Digital Connector.

When the Trinitron is replaced I'll still be buying from Sony. They just make good shit.

Sony said its decision was reached for reasons of cost as well as market demand. "We see a trend toward larger size screens in CRTs," said Eddie Taylor, a business planning manager for Sony's display division, in a brief interview.

Sony said its decision was reached for reasons of cost as well as market demand. "We see a trend toward larger size screens in CRTs," said Eddie Taylor, a business planning manager for Sony's display division, in a brief interview.

However, I prefer LCD screens for reading text. The square pixels and sharp edges lend themselves to that sort of purpose.

The interesting thing is that eventually everyone at home will be looking at my photos online with LCDs anyway, so it can't be ignored.

I just hope that as an artist I'll still be able to get CRT screens until LCD's have advanced to a point where they are acceptable, or DLP or other promising technology has taken over. I personally swear by the Sony 21" FD trinitron. We still use CRT's for everything in the effects industry, however I have seen the (very nice! IMHO) 22" Apple cinema LCD displays being used at a print studio facility in San Francisco that was producing the Macy's christmas catalog while I was visting. I asked them about the color and gamma shifting issue and he said "Yea, we just have to make sure and look at them dead center, and then it's okay." And in the final checking room, there were computers with CRTs and hoods on the monitors for fine tuning anyhow.

For now, my ultimate dream monitor is still the Sony FW-900 24" widescreen CRT display, and it's down to about $2k now.

--Mike

After a quick research - they were made by Sony called Glasstron Goggles PLM-A35/55 but seem to be out of production now. At one point they also anounced support for macs.

Notably, you can buy a MagicGate 64 MB Duo Stick at Sony's website - $70 for 64 MB is a little much, but it adds the Duo-to-Memory Stick adapter.

No reason to think I am running XP on this...
I have a totally stacked laptop that is pretty much double everything the powerbooks are which I use as a desktop, more or less. The Toshiba is for browsing and email and portability. With internal Wi-Fi it is great for GAIMing with friends whilst on the toilet or carrying under an arm on the way to the library. I am fortunate enough to have enough resources to have more than one laptop and I (*me* personally) am far happier with these two laptops running Debian and serving opposite functions than I would be using Mac hardware or software which is mostly bloated and just not configurable enough for my tastes.

I've got this great little thngy I use to play my CDs. The case outputs very clean analog audio, great headphone output and a SPDIF coax link which plugs directly into my receiver. It works great standalone, it has a complete front panel, ie backlit LCD display, stop, play, pause, next and previous track buttons. It has a cabeled remote, plays CD-RWs wonderfully, and dosen't heat up. It can run directly with only a power supply, and can even run without the power supply if needed!

Know what? It's a Sony D-EJ815 Discman.

Too bad the Area51-M has a desktop CPU in it and not a mobile P-4.

If you start configuring the systems comparably there is little to no differance in price between the PowerBook G4 and any PC laptops. I've been looking at them over the last several months. The PowerBook also has a few things going for it that are hard to find in other laptops. The Superdrive. I've only found a couple of laptops with DVD-R capabilities, and the one from Sony which was most closly matched to the PowerBook was more expensive at the time. It was also the only laptop other than the PowerBook that at the time took up to 1GB of RAM.

If you are looking for a desktop replacment you have few choices. The powerbook G4 is one, and something like the Sony GRX 600 is another.

What I find more important is size and weight. The powerbook is very slim at 1" thick and weighs in under 6lbs. The sony GRX 600 starts at 8lbs with one battery and is 1.6-1.8" thick.

There are other little differances like 10/100/1000 ethernet rather than 10/100 however that's not that important to most people. There is also the DVI output on the Powerbook and the VGA output on the pc laptops. Again, that won't matter to most people, but there are a growing number of digital displays becoming available so it may matter more in the future.

damn the scanners and printers should be a link. It goes to CD-RW/DVD-RW drive from Sony.

Sorry for the mixup

It's really too bad that so much effort was put into USB 2.0 when FireWire was available.

They have virtually identical practical transfer rates, so the additional capabilities of USB 2.0 go to waste - unless, I suppose, you find yourself doing huge amounts of simultaneous data transfer to multiple USB 2.0 devices on the same bus.

FireWire also sports two great benefits: more power (requires the 6-pin verion that is sadly not found on many smaller devices and x86 laptops) and no host-specific controller. People talk about putting Linux on a PDA and using USB to control devices from it, but until USB On-the-Go becomes pervasive, this cannot be a reality. On the other hand, Any FireWire device can communicate with any other.

FireWire is a more flexible standard, and with planned upgrades to 800 Mbps and higher, there's no shortage to it's possibilities.

If someone would just make a drive that doesn't use an IDE/FireWire bridge but actually has an on-drive FireWire interface, the benefits could be substantial.

*sigh*

As a note, you can get FireWire hard drives, , scanners, printers, and the Kodak DCS Pro 14n 14 megapixel camera will use FireWire

are nice but not necessarily innovative. I've got one of these, and if the sharp works this well it's a dream to use.

>Now you're just being silly. If you look up "alternative" in the dictionary I bet it doesn't say "an available choice that costs thousands of dollars more than a similar choice."

Actually, the price is at most double that of a decent quality TV of the same size.

IIRC, The Screen Savers were reviewing a 30" (or so, I can't remember the exact dimensions) monitor/TV combo with full VGA input and (according to them) a totally flat, high quality display that provided easy to read text for under $2000. They say that these monitors are very popular in meeting rooms for presentations. In comparison to a "regular" high-end TV, for example the Sony KV-32HV600, this represents a price inflation of only $100, which makes this an easy choice on the pocketbook.

I will furnish you with links and a model, if you would like. I would just need to search The Screen Savers site for past articles.

HTH.

Sony has had a Linux based PVR on the market in the US for the past 3 years or so.

The SVR 3000 is the current model.

Uses TiVo software.

That said, here's the equipment that we use to make it happen:

• 1 Canon GL2 MiniDV camera
• a bunch of Sony digital video cameras (that's not the exact model, but close to it)
• a boom mic (I have no idea what model, but it cost around $300, I think)
• a wireless clip-on mic (again, no idea what model, but it works well)
• a bunch of G4 Tower workstations with Final Cut Pro 3 (though this is mostly because we have a ton of people doing different things all at once, you don't really need more than 1)
• a dual 1Ghz G4 Tower with 1.5GB RAM on which we (I) assemble everyone's edited footage and export to video.

We use Final Cut Pro mostly because we have the luxury of a lab full of mid- to high-end Macs, but also because it is an extremely powerful software package for what you pay for it. The only thing that really compares in that price range is Avid XpressDV, which is slightly more expensive, runs on Windows and has its own unique advantages. Some people will try to tell you to use Adobe Premiere to edit your footage, as it is less expensive than either of the two suites that I just mentioned, but I wouldn't recommend it. While I have not worked with it personally, my filmmaking/broadcasting teacher worked with it at the last school he taught at, and it gave him nothing but trouble.

Any serious video editing will require some serious hardware to handle everything smoothly. Tons of RAM (on the order of 768MB or more) is a must, and it is also desireable to get a dual processor machine (dual Athlon systems are fairly inexpensive if you're working on a tight budget and choose to go with a Windows solution). Also, make sure your machine supports FireWire. On any fairly new Mac, this is a given, and support for it is built right into OS X and has worked flawlessly for me. FireWire is pretty much the only way to do video capture well, as most, if not all, DV cameras support it and it is many times faster than USB.

The editing will take much longer than shooting any of your actual footage. Make sure to plan your time accordingly.

Also, if you want to get better image quality, see if you can find a digital video camera that uses BetaSP instead of MiniDV. They may be more expensive, but they produce a much higher image quality and consequently, look much better on NTSC monitors and TVs (I'm assuming you're in the US here).

As far as distributing your footage is concerned, I know that Final Cut Pro allows you to export the movie in several different formats suitable for online distribution, as well as printing back to tape and burning to DVD. Printing to tape is how we finalize our broadcasts, as we just hook up a camcorder, record our edited footage onto it, and then hook the camcorder up to the coax broadcasting hardware with component video cables. Beyond that, I don't have any experience. For DVD authoring, I know that Apple also sells DVD Studio Pro, which I've heard is an excellent DVD authoring tool.

I've learned so much in this past year of working with digital video that I'm sure there's tons that I'm leaving out, but I hope this is enough to give you an idea of what is required. Please feel free to respond with any more questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Check out the Sony DRX500UL (External USB2/Firewire) at http://www.sonystyle.com/ or the Sony DRU500A (Internal EIDE).

Both read/write DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R, and CD-RW. DVD-RAM is basically obsolete.

I got the Sony DRU500A a few weeks ago. It does DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, CD-R, and CD-RW. No DVD-RAM, but who uses that anyway? Comes with all kinds of great software. Not bad for $350.

Alternately, the US version is viewable (and orderable) here. MSRP: $1599

I saw this at Micro Center and thought it looked sweet. If I had money to burn this would be my next PC...

` Record label offers them more, because it a) sells more due to hassle factor, and b) can partially support it from hardware revenues.

Why do people think Sony Music can offset losses by selling more electronics? Sony Music doesn't sell electronics. Sony Electronics sells electronics. Sony Music is a separate, autonomous company that sells MUSIC.

They don't share revenue. If Sony Music loses money, they can't "offset" it with anything but more music.

Sure the overall global Sony Corp balance sheet might work out, but if Sony Music (or BMG, EMI, Warner Music, UMG) loses money, they fire workers and go out of business. Individual businesses. Remember that.

Sony obviously does think just that! Have you seen this PC/room stereo (aka P.o.S.)

Ha, its a bad stereo and a bad pc! just for the kind of stupid consumer Sony knows you are!

This seems a little extreme to me, since sitting at the computer just to listen to music is stupid. What about car stereos and high-fidelity CD players?
Well, I'm sure it'll be okay as long as you use some suitable hardware.
Who wants one market when you can have an entire horizontal?

Ob-link

RadioShack is selling it for about $60. I think this price is way better than the Universal Remote Commander Sony is selling for $200, but then again I'm probably getting some features in the Sony remote that I won't get with the Kameleon.

In my case, I'd buy one because the cost of an extra 59.2Wh battery for my Sony Vaio is US$249.99. For an extra $50, I can get this behemoth 120Wh battery pack that I can simply leave in my rollerbag and just yank out a cable when I feel I need to start leeching some amps off of it.

Actually Sony has had a laptop that can burn DVD's for several months now Take a look here here

My wife has a Crusoe-powered Fujitsu P-2000 which is infatuating because it's so small and light (3.4 pounds with internal CDRW/DVD), runs silently, runs cool, and is reasonably priced.

However, the Crusoe is just too slow for power users... people say it's equivalent to a P3 at roughly 1/2 the clock speed, but I've compared the P-2040 to a 4-year-old Inspiron 3500 (p2/300) and the Inspiron was noticebly faster at starting and switching between apps. At the leog forums, most topics involve improving performance. Windows XP and 2k run some apps OK if you don't multitask, but even then you need to tweak the OSs for speed. You can forget about XP's eye-candy. Hope you like browsing with Opera because you can forget Mozilla... even Phoenix is too sluggish on the Crusoe! (yet Phoenix runs fine on the above-mentioned P2/300!) Also, don't bother installing the newest versions of Mandrake or Redhat... either use an older release or stick with Desbian and Gentoo.

For anyone in the USA who needs speed in a small laptop, check out dynamism, which imports many cool Japanese laptops (at a premium, unfortunately).

There is also the Sony Vaio SRX99. Unfortunately, it's missing Fujitsu P-2000's slick hi-res 5:3 ratio widescreen, but it's the same size, is lighter (2.7 pounds vs 2.8 pounds for the Fujitsu-without-CDRW/DVD), has a faster CPU (P3/850), larger screen (area-wise), has a touchpad, and even gets better battery life. It does not have an internal CD bay, but Sony's external CDRW/DVD drive is small, light, and bus-powered.

So, I don't see TabletPC saving Crusoe. Any Tablets that weigh 3+ pounds can use Pentiums and there isn't enough of a market for slow 2 pound devices (tablets or notebooks) outside of Japan.

I was really interested in getting a Sony Picturebook. This was about 4-5 months ago, when the latest ones had not yet hit the United States. I asked a client of mine, who is Japanese, to get me pricing. He obliged, but only after warning me about the Transmeta processor. "It doesn't work well when you try to run multiple applications," he said. "Everyone says it's slow."

I asked him who had told him that. He said it was the Sony rep at the store where he bought his Vaio. Uh-oh.

I knew a Transmeta 867MHz processor wouldn't perform as well as an Intel 867MHz processor, but I did some digging and was shocked to figure out how much slower it really is. Check out these benchmarks from Tom's Hardware. The Transmeta 600MHz processor got stomped by a "vintage" PII/366MHz notebook. That's terrible.

To me, small size and battery life rank higher on my list than pure performance. Still, the Transmeta processors run so slowly that the only way I could justify buying one is if they had 5+ hours of battery life. But they don't -- the PictureBook is only advertising 2.5 hours of battery life. Compare this to the (admittedly larger) 3.7-pound IBM X30, where Walter Mossberg put one through the grinder and got 3 hours and 29 minutes of battery life. IBM is claiming 5+ hours in BatteryMark for the same laptop.

Transmeta did one thing, and that was to get Intel turned on to the fact that consumers want good battery life in notebooks. I think the quote from the article puts it best: "Intel's focus on battery life happened because Transmeta pressured them into it... forced them to do something different. The good news is you've got a giant to acknowledge you but the bad news is you've woken the giant."

Right now, the giant is still stomping Transmeta, and I doubt that tablet PCs will really put Transmeta back in the running. Whatever Transmeta can come up with, Intel has proven that they can match. Transmeta might make initial inroads, just like they did on subnotebooks, but eventually Intel will again wake up, and this time I don't think Transmeta will survive.

is listed under accessories.

War-dog-walking, anyone?

That's not a skateboard. IT's a scooter of some type. on the website It is called a speedboard. It looks somewhat like a snakeboard but thr is no way it oculd be used to do any tricks (at least not without a pretty major ramp). TRicks are the main reason a lot of people skate and it just doesn't seem possible with this accesory

Well... though these things fail to catch my attention just as much as 3d-screens do, I did some reading up on it... and... well - it seems to me there are a couple of things wrong with the whole concept (besides it being completely stupid ;).

First of, I am simply unable to see who the buyers are... Is it just me, or do "real" geeks look down on this stuff? Then who's left? Tech-geeks? Probably kids with (too) rich parents... which leads me to the second thing I don't get: THE PRICE OF THE GODDAMN SOFTWARE!

It seems, that you can modify your small doggish robot with some software... but the price is $ 449.00(!!) This puts it out of reach of most kids, as they wont be able to utilize it anyway. Maybe at a tenth of the price, the kids who get the robot in the first place can convince their parents to buy the software as well...

Hmm... anyone working on a open source program to replace the Sony stuff? ;)

Ohh... and another thing: Sony should be ashamed of themselves for claiming that this is an example of AI! Really... the most advanced models (with the CPU clock speed of 384MHz) have only 75 responses. If it were to approach any kind of true AI, it seems to me that it would at the very least have to have a learning-routine and some storage (besides the 16 MB that can be used for stuff like storing snapshots... :| ).

/me waves a finger at Sony (NO, not the indecent one). "Shame on you Sony!"

Yeah, I do support for my university too, and I moved in this girl who has that new 20" from Sony and the worst is that you know that she's just going to be using to for AIM and solitaire...oh, and Morpheus...

Does anybody know where I can find a list of wide screen LCDs? Right now, I could find only the Sony SDM-V72W, but it doesn't support DVI.

I was in the market for a larger flatscreen since my 4 year old Hitach superscan elite CRT was showing its age. After looking around, there was no way I was going to pay $2000 for a 21in LCD when good 21in CRT's are available on ebay for less than $300. I ended up purchasing a Sony CDP-G520P at NewEgg. Its flat. its 21in, and its silver so it will match everything else since silver seems to be dominate color these days. Whenever someone walks in to my room the first thing the comment on is the monitor. Stick with CRT unlesss you can deal with a 15in LCD.

Sony already makes something like this. It's not as small as the unit we're discussing, but it's also less than 1/2 of the price. The Sony Psyc DVD player.

Kinda stupid looking though.

Does it support both +R and -R discs?

I'm waiting for one of the standards to go away or both to merge in all drives (betamax-fobia).

Sony has a DVD-RW/+RW unit coming out next month. The positive reviews, speedy 4x DVD+RW write speed, and a pretty good pricepoint ($350) might make this a popular unit VERY quickly.

There are also notebooks that have 3D hardware, a gig of ram, 15" screens, and last 10 minutes on a battery, because some people want fairly portable "workstations" and never intend to run them for long times on battery.

The ignorance of the slashdot crowd, and new media once again proves itself. Sony already has a TV connected pc, complete with remote, starting at $1,999. Check it out. Now who's over priced?

I went with the SR series over the picturebook very recently. I used a picturebook a bit, then sent it back. The half screen is just too annoying in productivity software to me, let alone gaming. I have heard the touchpad vs a keyboard pointer, but both suck, and the jogdial is just an annoyance where I like to sit my thumb on both laptops so I disable it. This leaves you with the pain of scrolling up and down to see anything on the picturebook. I love my SR even with that damn jog dial where it is, I usually run it for around 5 hours on a single charge and I don't have the extended life battery. The only thing I'm disgruntled about is RedHat being a pain in the ass to install on it because of some wierd conflict between the mostly useless sony memory stick port and the usb port. There is a work around to get the CDROM install in RedHat to work on older models of the SR's but it doesn't seem to work on this version. If anyone has had any luck with a CDROM based RedHat install with a new SR drop me a line.

SRX Series
Picturebook

I went with the SR series over the picturebook very recently. I used a picturebook a bit, then sent it back. The half screen is just too annoying in productivity software to me, let alone gaming. I have heard the touchpad vs a keyboard pointer, but both suck, and the jogdial is just an annoyance where I like to sit my thumb on both laptops so I disable it. This leaves you with the pain of scrolling up and down to see anything on the picturebook. I love my SR even with that damn jog dial where it is, I usually run it for around 5 hours on a single charge and I don't have the extended life battery. The only thing I'm disgruntled about is RedHat being a pain in the ass to install on it because of some wierd conflict between the mostly useless sony memory stick port and the usb port. There is a work around to get the CDROM install in RedHat to work on older models of the SR's but it doesn't seem to work on this version. If anyone has had any luck with a CDROM based RedHat install with a new SR drop me a line.

SRX Series
Picturebook

You can get a sony clie with that bucks
( 8megs, hi res ... )

( Exception being for portable Squaresoft games. No portable Sony system. )

Vaio?

Don't know what's new about this. It is not Sony's first Bluetooth camera. I believe DCR-IP7BT was their first Bluetooth enabled model.

This is the other way around on Casio.

The Cassiopeia has a 64-bit NEC processor that is forced down to 32-bit by Casio. But at least they don't advertise it as 64 bit.

If you really want Palm OS, get a Sony CLIE which has colors that do seem more alive then the Palm colors!

But the Sonys are very nice. They're selling models with 320x320 resolution at greyscale, with 16 megs of RAM at less than $200. Tiny, huge memory capacity, runs all Palm apps, fast.. what's not to like?

Features

* Built-in 40W FM Stereo Receiver

* MiniDisc Recorder / Player

They don't skip. Honest. I have tried both panasonic and sony offerings. The sony g-protected I found to be superior, but make sure it has a line out in addition to the headphone jack. I have a great little case that keeps it secure in my hand while I run. I took back the regular sony one because it didn't have line out. I believe the car version does, but they don't sell it in Canada. car mp3 cd Remember make sure it has line out. Then all you need is a burner windows or linux. I hear the usb memory players still take ages to load ( 10 mins ) whats the big deal about 5 minute burn for 200 songs? then you also havea CD player to boot!

Try a Minidisc for this kind of stuff - it is slower to transfer music to the minidisc itself rather than with MP3 players, but more durable than hard disks on the run. The discs themselves are quite cheap so are probably a better bet than solid state MP3 players. The new NetMD thing (faster recording ability) might be a problem on *nixes, but an analogue hookup (or digital via the SP/DIF cables) are pretty good for recording music, but only in real time. The recorders also have the additional benefit of being dictaphones if you really need one (or for recording concerts etc.). If you use pdas a lot you might consider a SD card/memory stick bases solution just for being able to move stuff between your pda/digital camera/portable player etc.

Here's a link to Sony's Walkman page.
Hit the link at the top right of the page (its a pop-up mind) which says S2 Sports - they have their own dedicated line of sports products including NetMD minidisc recorder/player.