Otaku Gadgets

Saturday is the day when I treat you to the latest in Apple. Apple – the company that gave us the iPod, the iTunes Store and the iPhone. Not to mention a whole line of great computers the fondly call Macs. Did you know that Apple practically invented the portable computer line?

We have made a whole week without a tablet rumor. I guess we will hear less of the tablet around holiday times. Buyers should not be distracted during buying.

Get to the other side to get your piece of the Saturday Apple Pie.

Continue reading “Saturday Apple Pie: It’s The iPhone All Over And Steve’s The Best!” »

The LCD Displays are replacing aging CRT displays worldwide. The main advantages of LCDs are that they save energy and precious desktop place in office setups. However, there are many people in CAD/CAM related work who need to use more than one monitor for increasing workflow. The same is true about some corporate houses where multiple users need to work on a single file sometimes. For these people the newly launched eVGA Interview Dual Display LCD will be a boon. This LCD monitor packs in dual 17 inch LCD screens attached by a hinge. They can be rotated as well.

Continue reading “eVGA InterView Dual Display: Ideal For Studio And Corporate Setups” »

The last week has been quite exciting for the techies in Japan. The annual gadget extravaganza, CEATEC Japan, had some pretty mind-boggling stuff and the usual futuristic concepts that you would expect at such an event. Even though the gadgets that drew the most attention were mostly prototypes, they still generated enough buzz for the tech world to turn their short attention span to them for longer than usual.

So here’s a special CEATEC version of Catch Up Monday for you. Get to the other side to catch up on the latest in tech.

Continue reading “Catch Up Monday: The CEATEC ‘09 Gadget Round Up” »

Intel has been making the headlines for various reasons ever since this year’s IDF happened. The things showed off at the annual event have the industry still buzzing with the various developments around them. Of course, that is what Intel had hoped for. Moblin has been on and off the news for the past week or two thanks to Dell and others. Light Peak on the other hand has been getting a lot of attention due to the Apple connection. Intel has come in to the focus once again but in a rather indirect manner after NVIDIA announced that they are ‘postponing’ the development of new chipsets. Read all about it on the other side.

Continue reading “Intel In The News: Chipset Wars, Moblin Plans and Light Peak Leaks” »

Samsung is one of the leading producers of LCD monitors in the world. Samsung monitors offer a variety of interfaces such as, DVI and VGA interfaces. In addition to these features Samsung has recently introduced a new type of LCD monitor with a built-in USB video card with the scalable technology of Display Link. This new version of LCD monitor is coined as Samsung SyncMaster 940UX.

There is not so much difference in the exterior of the SyncMaster 940 UX as compared with other LCD monitors. It does not possess any important details on its exterior to proclaim itself as the first of its kind in the USB (video card) category. Yet it has a charming look thanks to its black and silver color scheme, which fits it in any type of environment. The SyncMaster 940 UX meets all the requirements of the customer in its look, additional enhancements, picture quality, response time, sharpness, accuracy, great color, and even offers backlight to boot. The most important feature which differentiates it from the rest is the USB video card interface.

Continue reading “USB MONITOR BY SAMSUNG” »

Priced in the range from $150 to $180 the new LG flatiron W2053TQ provides you with a very decent movie and gaming performance along with a couple of useful eco friendly options. The matte screen is better than the HP 2009m’s glossy and reflective screen and lets you easily see the dark details. The two are very much even in terms of performance but HP loses out on the cost and the more intuitive onscreen display of LG. So in case you are on budget you can prefer HP whereas, those looking for conserving energy consumption LG is the better option.

Design and Features

The LG Flatron comes with a finger print attracting and a glossy black bezel surrounding a 20-inch non reflective matte screen. The complete display is slightly longer than the HP 2009m’s 19.75 inch display. The back of the monitor has the overall glossy motif and comes with an arc shaped vent. As a sole ergonomic option the LG Flatron W2053TQ has a 15 degree back tilt with no pivoting, panel swiveling or screen height adjustment. The power button is placed above the groove on the bezel and to the left of it is the touch sensitive OSD array, which includes 6 buttons: Smart, Fun, Menu, Engine/Down, Source/Up, and Auto set. Each OSD button is invisible, but it illuminates with Red lights as soon as you touch any of the button names. The navigation on the whole is a bit unintuitive and clunky.

As far as performance is concerned this LG Flatron model scored and matched the HP 2009m’s 87 score on CNET lab’s Display mate based performance tests. Monitors from both the labels handled text pretty well, however the HP performed better in the 9500K color temperature than the 6500K color temperature. And the exact opposite happened for LG which performed much better at 6500K as compared with 9500K temperature at which the screen turned bluish. The brightness score at 270 candelas per meter square is lower than the 300 as claimed by LG W2053TQ model. HP 2009m fares much worse with a brightness score of 255 candelas per square meter. Both monitors when exposed to the black screen test, exhibit heavy backlight bleed through on both the top and bottom edges of the display.

In terms of power consumption tests, the LG has a large approximately 3.55 watt power draw during standby and for a 20 inch monitor the On/Default power draw is higher than ones liking. As compared to Lenovo L215’s 28.15 watt power draw, LG drew 37.21 watts in this state. However under the Eco option LG improved upon its carbon footprint drawing to only 20.36 watts in the On/Default state. As per experts the average cost to run LG W2053TQ per year in a normal manner would be $13.56 and $8.54 with the power-saving features turned on. For similar comparisons Lenovo comes to $8.93 and HP $9.46 per year.

In all, the LG model comes with eco friendly options for lower energy costs, and has a decent movie and gaming performance. It lacks in the navigation options and has the only ergonomic option of screen tilt.