LG GSA-E50L

LG must have been hiring fashion designer lately to help design their product lineup. There was the Chocolate, Fantasy monitors and even Red-Ringed LCD TVs. And further adding to do that list of beauties, is the new LG GSA-E50L external optical drive.

The drive is enclosed in glossy plastic with a white rim in between the top and lower half of the drive. It look very very classy and stylish in its black, white, penguin-like glossy combination.

The design is simple with only one button for ejecting the tray from the drive. The drive is powered by a USB port. You can also get an adapter to power the drive up since it has a 5 volt DC connection next to the USB port. The drive supports every available media format in market, and yes, it can suppor DVD-RAMs. Since this is and external drive, read and write speeds are much slower than its internal counterparts. The LG GSA-E50L can write up to 24x on CD-Rs and 8x on DVD-Rs.

Panasonic’s 103-inch

Remember the Panasonic’s 103-inch plasma TV? It was once the world’s largest Plasma TV but it has been replaced by the 150-inch model this year announced at CES 2008. Anyway, if you wonder anyone would spend that sort of money to get a $50,000-$80,000 plasma instead of a projector, think again. The news from Far East reveals there have been 15 of them sold worldwide from US, Europe to Japan, and 5 of them were sold to a man from Middle East. But they are still far from reaching the 5000 units target, the 150-inch replacement seems to be a better and more logical choices over projector. Time will tell.

JAKKS Pacific announces EyeClops BioniCam portable microscope

If microscopes like those from Celestron are a bit more than you need, you may want to keep an eye out for JAKKS Pacific's upcoming EyeClops BioniCam, which is obviously aimed at kids but, as we've seen in the past, will no doubt appeal to more adventuresome users out there as well. A follow-up to the company's EyeClops Bionic Eye, this one ups the features considerably with the addition of an LCD screen, which you can use to peek at things at magnification levels of 100x, 200x or 400x. Also like that considerably higher-end Celestron, this one packs a built-in digital camera (no word on the resolution) and an included USB thumb drive to make transfers to a computer as easy as can be. No word on a price just yet, unfortunately, though you can look for it to hit stores sometime this fall.

Samsung intros well-spec'd SyncMaster 2493HM / 2693HM LCD monitors

Believe it or not, Samsung took the opportunity to unveil a couple of newcomers at Macworld, proving that there was indeed something left in the tank after CES. And on paper, this pair is one to be reckoned with. Up first is the 24-inch SyncMaster 2493HM, which features a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, 10,000:1 (dynamic) contrast ratio, five-millisecond response time, 400 cd/m2 brightness, 160-degree viewing angles and DVI / HDMI inputs to boot. As for the 25.5-inch 2693HM, it mimics its smaller sibling in most every way, but does include a VGA input and steps the dynamic contrast ratio down to 3,000:1. Both units also include built-in multimedia speakers and stunning good looks, and best of all, they can become yours right this moment for $599 and $699, respectively.