Burners and Boxes and Players, Oh My!

The calendar may say July, but for consumer electronics vendors the holidays are just around the corner -- and today Samsung previewed its upcoming new home entertainment goodies. All I can say is, start saving up soon.

It took nearly two hours to check out several rooms full of products ranging from DVD players and burners, camcorders, and home theaters in a box to portable audio/video players and set-top boxes.



One of the items likely to appear on my holiday wish list is a Yepp MP3 player about the size of a lipstick. It's called the YP-T5V. The version that comes with 256MB of flash memory will go for $149, while the 128MB YPT5H runs $119.

Other stuff most likely to appear on my wish list . . .

Samsung also showed one of the first portable music/video players and still image viewers to be based on Microsoft's Portable Media Center software. The $500 Yepp YH99 will have a 20GB hard drive and a battery that should last for four hours of video playback on its 3.5-inch color LCD display, or 12 hours of music. The YH99 will also support Microsoft's Janus digital rights management scheme, so you can use it with content downloaded from Janus-compliant subscription-based services that don't now permit non-PC playback. (You can check out the specs on Amazon's pre-order page.)

We also saw a camcorder that's no bigger than a deck of cards, yet can store about 15 to 20 minutes of 30 frames-per-second video on its 512MB of internal flash. This one is so new that it doesn't yet have a formal name, but the estimated street price will be about $499. Our Samsung tour guide says it's being called the Spidercam internally, and may not be ready in time for the holidays.

Samsung will also release 12-inch portable DVD player with a huge viewing angle and three headphone jacks, priced at $999.



Then there's the DVD-HD941 DVD player, which converts DVD video to HD formats using Faroudja line-doubling technology. The demo of Laurence of Arabia on one of Samsung's DLP rear-projection HDTVs looked super, and for $299, the HD941 will be a neat accessory to the LCD-HDTV I'm hoping to persuade my husband to get. Honey, are you reading?

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