New Products - September 2004 Page 2

0904 new products - bose Bose Like the idea of storing your music on a hard disk, but don't like creating playlists? The Bose Lifestyle 48 uMusic system is just for you. As you rip music from the CD/DVD player to its hard disk, which has room for 340 hours of audio, it retrieves information from an onboard database - not just disc and track titles, but also things like mood and the artist's influences. When you're listening to a song, you can use the remote to indicate if you like it or not and if you'd like to hear more in a similar vein. Your choices over time determine a profile of your preferences, so when you leave music selection up to the system, it will pick the kinds of songs you like to listen to. Ready for DVD movies or surround music, the system includes five Jewel Cube speakers (available in silver, black, or white) and the Acoustimass bass module (in black only). The supplied radio-frequency (RF) remote works through walls. Price: $3,999. www.bose.com, 800-444-2673

0904 new products - sharpSharp Flat-panel LCD TVs have reached the big time - 45 inches big, to be exact. That's the diagonal screen size of Sharp's LC-45GX6U, the flagship of the company's Aquos line of LCD sets. Native resolution is a mouth-watering 1,920 x 1,080 pixels - enough to render images at 1080p (progressive-scan) resolution. The normal HDTV formats, 1080i (interlaced) and 720p, are scaled to match. The panel has the latest kind of HDTV-capable input, an HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) connector that can carry digital signals for both audio and video, as well as a PC Card slot for viewing digital photos onscreen. A tiny, super-efficient 1-bit digital amplifier powers the removable speakers attached to the bottom. Price: $9,999. www.sharpusa.com, 800-237-4277

0904 new products - panasonic Panasonic The mammoth 160-gigabyte (GB) hard drive built into Panasonic's DMR-E95H DVD recorder can hold up to 284 hours of TV programs in EP mode. But even recording in XP mode (the best quality), you get 36 hours - more than enough for a whole season of The Apprentice . If you want to keep any shows, you just burn them to write-once DVD-R or rewritable DVD-RAM discs. Helping with your time-shifting, the TV Guide On Screen interface lets you pick shows to record up to 8 days in advance. As long as your broadcast or cable feed includes program-guide data, the timer doesn't even need a telephone-line connection! Secure Digital and PC Card slots on the front panel let you view digital photos or transfer them to the hard drive, and you can offload camcorder footage through the FireWire port. Price: $900. www.panasonic.com, 800-211-7262

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