GW-124

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J@pan Inc Magazine Presents:
G A D G E T W A T C H
The Hottest Gadgets and Gizmos from Japan
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Issue No. 124

Thursday, November 27, 2003
(Long URLs may break across two lines, so copy to your browser.)

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More info: http://www.tuj.ac.jp/itp/newsad.html
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Name: Aeon DZ-338
Category: Digital camera
Price: 14,800 yen
Release date in Japan: November 28, 2003

The Gist: It's all very well for the rich kids out there who can buy
what they want, but for most of us, the holiday season is a tough time
for the pocketbook. What we'd really like to see is a few gadgets that
won't actually require a begging session in the bank manager's office
and a promise to the wife to do the washing and take out the trash for
the next 13 years. Happily, then, Aeon bounces along and unveils the
DZ-338, a 3-million-pixel digital camera set to sell at an
UNBELIEVABLE price -- 14,800 yen to you, good sir. Capable of
producing images to a max of 2,976x2,232 pixels and 320x240-dot AVI
video at 15 frames per second, with 8MB of internal Flash RAM memory,
plus one SD card slot, the DZ-338 is an absolute steal. Size-wise, the
camera weighs in at 110x27.8x50mm and 95g. And it's compatible with
both Windows and Mac via USB 1.1. It even looks great, in its smart,
compact silver casing. But there's no optical zoom.

More info: http://www.aeonshop.com/aeon/320digi/index.html

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Name: Ricoh Caplio RR211
Category: Digital camera
Price: Open (but approx. 20,000 yen)
Release date in Japan: December 12, 2003

The Gist: Staying with the theme of unfathomably sexily priced
widgets, Ricoh's new digital camera in the Caplio series, the RR211,
is a 2-megapixel still digicam (1,930,000-pixel CMOS sensor) capable
of knocking out images to a max of 1,600x1,200 dot JPEGs and -- in an
eerie instance of coincidental engineering thinking -- 320x240-dot AVI
video at 15 frames per second (insert X-Files music here). The RR211
has a 1.5-inch TFT viewfinder monitor, range of 1.2m to infinity and
shutter speeds of 1/2,000 to 1/15 of a second. There's 8MB of internal
Flash RAM and SD and MMC memory card slots on board, plus a USB
interface, making it good for both Macs and PC. The camera's
dimensions are 82x30.5x60mm, and it weighs 110g. And -- time to reel
out that X-Files music again -- no optical zoom, sadly. But I bet
Ricoh is already wishing its marketing people had found a window to
"do lunch" with Aeon's marketing people and thereby have time to
discover that they're making a near-identical camera to the DZ-338,
only making it uglier, more expensive and technologically inferior. If
you opt to buy this camera, can I recommend that Sir also purchases
the optional Ricoh DZ-D'oh! Brown Paper Bag for, bizarrely, 14,800
yen, to hide its hideous form from the gaze of the innocent public?

More info: http://www.ricoh.co.jp/

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=====================================================================
============= ENTREPRENEUR ASSOCIATION OF TOKYO =====================
December Seminar
The December 2nd speaker will be the enthusiastic and inspiring
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business - Passion, Perseverance, Professionalism, Peak Performance,
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Date: Tuesday, December 2nd - http://www.ea-tokyo.com
Email: info@ea-tokyo.com
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Name: IO Data AVLP1/DVD
Category: AV
Price: 29,800 yen
Release date in Japan: mid December 2003

The Gist: The AVLP1/DVD is what the science boffins call a "Network
DVD player," which means that you can connect it to your PC at the
same time as your TV -- this then allows you to miss extremely
important recordings through your inability to program not one, but
TWO confusing electronics components. (The video being the other.
Thought I'd make that clear.)

Not really. The "Network" bit refers to the built-in 100BASE-TX/
10BASE-T Ethernet port on the machine that, once connected to your PC
via a hub or router (or even wireless LAN trickery), will allow owners
to view pretty much any DVD format (except DVD-RAM), MPEG-1 & 2, DivX
and XviD files, Bitmap, JPEG, GIF and PNG images and WMA, MP3, MP2,
AAC, AC3, PCM, OggVorbis and SMELL-Ovision media files nice and big on
the television. OK, I made the SMELL-Ovision one up but, incredibly,
not OggVorbis. And you can use your TV remote and the GUI on the TV
screen to control the PC files remotely! The AVLP1 is making this
week's Gadget Watch because the marketing folk have delayed the
machine's release from this month to next. Which they'd have known if
they'd read the manual.

More info:
http://www.iodata.jp/prod/multimedia/video/2003/avlp1dvd/index.htm

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Subscribers: 4,678 as of November 27, 2003

STAFF
Written by: Max Everingham (max@everingham.net)
Edited by: J@pan Inc editors (editors@japaninc.com)

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