For the DIY DVR enthusiast, Hitachi just announced their new CinemaStar 7K1000.B. Coming in sizes up to 1 terabyte, the 7,200 RPM drives promise to be the "industry's quietest, most energy-efficient 3.5-inch hard drives." But what can a 1TB CinemaStar actually do? It can store 247 hours of HD MPEG4 and handle 10 streams of data simultaneously (as usual, your tuners are the main limiting factor). Hitachi also promises that the CinemaStars are designed for operation 24/7, so hopefully you won't lose about 45 episodes of No Reservations like I just did. There are no prices yet, but look for the new CinemaStar 7K1000.B this August.

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Back in January, Hitachi released the BD9H Blu-ray camcorder, and it's taken just six months for the next generation to come along. The DZ-BD10H takes the same core design, but squeezes it into a slightly smaller package. It's still a full HS palmcorder, recording to 8-cm BD, DVD-R/RW/RAM or a 30GB HDD but this time the sensor is a 7-megapixel CMOS and the camera has the ability to write stills and movies to SD/SDHC cards too.

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Be happy: A new wireless HD video standard guarantees that major brands including Sony, Sharp, Hitachi, Samsung and Motorola will have interoperable wireless video streaming. Amimon--the chip makers behind the "video modem" wireless HD tech we've been seeing on and off for the last few years, and most recently in Belkin's Flywire--is announcing the WHDI consortium with the above members, formed to standardise their wireless HD spec and embed it in member companies' TVs, projectors and HD video sources. The result is a network of HD components, streaming uncompressed 1080p video not just through one room like competing UWB standards, but to and from any source to any TV in your entire home, with a range comparable to Wi-Fi. Pretty impressive stuff.

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It's always great when companies break out of their stodgy PR molds and just go for it--remember those fantastic tokusatsu Norton Fighter ads? Here we have Hitachi, no strangers to the out-of-the-box viral video, ushering us all into the "Tera Era," a magical wonderland of smiling flowers, talking bytes, hard disk actuator suns, and catchy Schoolhouse Rock jingles. The juxtaposition of traditional PR-speak on their YouTube page which looks like a clown threw up all over it ("This amazing collision of Capacity, Content and Culture") and this video, which is just another kind of PR-speak, is still pretty incredible. Check out the original "Get Perpendicular" spot for comparison below.

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About a year ago we brought you the first retail terabyte HDD, the Deskstar 7K1000, and now Hitachi has released the Deskstar 7K1000.B. And Hitachi's worked quite hard on it: With a 32MB buffer and a three-disk layout, it's apparently the "world's most power-efficient 1TB drive" and consumes about 43% less power when idling. And for those of you who think "bleh" to the power savings, it also has built-in encryption, which Hitachi says doesn't impact on read/write speeds at all. Out soon for US$279, which puts it in competition with the Samsung HD103UJ. [Hitachi and BoingBoing Gadgets]

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At CES, Hitachi showed off an impressive 1.5-inch-thin plasma display. Today at the CEA industry update the company has told us that the concept will become a reality when the televisions go on sale in the US sometime during 2009. They also hinted that LED-backlit LCDs could be available in as little as 6 months. As for OLED, that's still a ways off.

AU: Remember Australia, Hitachi doesn't care much for us anymore, so we won't be seeing this down here ever.

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The Good News: Toshiba and Hitachi are both flaunting new technologies to make MRAM (the successor to DRAM) more plausible for public consumption. Plus, the United States and Korea both have begun national-level projects to develop the tech.

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Impress Robot Watch just published footage of Hitachi's anime-styled EMIEW 2, the little guy who took a spill during his debut last November. The new video shows that his feet, tipped with wheels, give him a Segway-like way of staying upright, with little micromovements. If the terrain gets too rough, there's always the second set of wheels on his kneecaps, which you see him using at the beginning. Like many Japanese constructs, this one has a creepy child's voice, with which it apparently says some unexpected things like "What colour is love?" (Maybe that's an error in translation, but still...) Watching the Segway-style manoeuvring, I am left wondering how two of these would do in a rock-em-sock-em scenario. [Impress]

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Fujitsu might have been the first to introduce a 2.5" 7200rpm hard drive with 320GB capacity, but Hitachi is hot on their trail. Today, Hitachi announced that they too have a quick lil'-drive, the Travelstar 7K320. The HDD will support the same SATA 3Gbps interface as the Fujitsu, but will supposedly use less power. With only a 1.8 watt read/write power draw and a 0.8 watt low power idle, Hitachi claims the 7200rpm 7K320 power consumption is on par with their 5400rpm models. So if you were set on getting a faster 2.5" 320GB HD for your notebook, Hitachi's version should be available in a few weeks with a US$219 price tag. Press release after the jump.

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Six months after announcing it would bring its 1.5"-thick UltraThin line to the US, Hitachi is finally starting to ship product. Sizes range from 32" to 47" and 1080p from 37" and up—previously we thought the line would stop... Read More »