Pioneer has a new model of their "Sugureco" video recorders o­n the horizon. It's loaded with an 800GB hard drive and DVD burner.

Two new products for your bathroom from Pioneer.

This isn't exactly a product, but something rather interesting I came across while looking for news from this past week. At their announcement event for their new PDP-506HD, PDP-436HD, and PDP-436SX plasma displays, Pioneer showed the following slide:

The above photo, taken by Watch Impress, demonstrates just how far plasma displays have come in the past few years. The first row contains brightness and contrast -- as you can see, brightness for Pioneer's 50" plasma displays is 3.1 times what it was in 1997, and contrast ratio approximately 18 times better. Meanwhile, the next row contains power consumption, and you can see that it is down 29% versus the same set in 1997. The light emitting efficiency is 2.2 times better, and the actual weight of the set is down 25%. It's always nice to take a look back and see how far you've come, even if it's o­nly a period of 7 years.

Pioneer has improved their top-of-the-range cordless digital headphones by adding AAC support, using a new 48-bit DSP chip and increasing the model number by 1000. The SE-DIR2000C headphones will be available in late July for approximately $US450. If you're in the market for some of these, you may also want to check out JVC's HP-W1000 which offer a similar level of specs.

Here's a new DVR from Pioneer, and it is apparently the first to support writing to Dual Layer DVD-R.

Here's a new CD player for DJs from Pioneer, packed with a bunch of features I'll likely never understand the importance of. I've never tried to be a DJ, nor do I think I ever will.

Still, it's 50,000 yen. Any DJs out there want to tell us if this is worth it or not?

In what looks to be o­ne of the most technical articles I've translated in a long time, Kyoto University, Pioneer, and Rohm all got together to announce some new technologies they've developed intended for use in flexible displays.

A "Bio-nanofiber" may sound like something out of Shadowrun (if any of you have ever heard of it...), but it could very well be the technology that powers the rollable LCDs of tomorrow.

Here's Pioneer's latest DVD burner, and it supports burning dual layer DVD±R discs at 6x. I sort of lost track of DVD burners when they got to 8x (my own drive supports dual layered burning, but I've never burnt a dual layered disc before), but this is a pretty good indicator of how far things have come since then.

Also, I've finally come to realize how complicated these competing DVD formats are.

Hope they float!

Pioneer's new plasma display panels (PDPs) can display 5.75 billion colors, thanks to its "direct color filter" technology.