Remember that 108-inch LCD that broke a heap of records and wowed us all a couple of years ago? You know, until Panasonic went and showed of its 150-inch Plasma. Yeah, that one. Well, Sharp firmly believes (for some reason) that despite the current economy, there is still a market in Australia for $169,000 televisions.

Don't get me wrong: I saw the 108-incher when it came to Australia just after its CES showcase, and it was gorgeous. Picture quality was breathtaking. But is now the right time to be launching a TV that costs as much as a house in some parts of the country? My instinct says no, but there is still a part of me that cries out "yes!"

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The celebrated roboticists of Carnegie Mellon University are using their DARPA Urban Challenge know-how to give the gift of autonomous operation to a 700-ton mining truck formerly known as the Caterpillar 797B. As you might have suspected, the Japanese construction-gear firm Komatsu was actually first with an automated mining vehicle, but being Japanese, it's more compact, OK puny. Officially no mobile robot will have weighed as much as this bright yellow bastard, according to Discovery. It's way too easy to make a Terminator reference here, so I'm gonna have to play the Maximum Overdrive card. Not scared yet? Read on.

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How big is too big? That's the question that you inevitably ask yourself once you spend any amount of time with Panasonic's new 150-inch plasma TV prototype. We visited it in Panasonic's towering warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey last Friday, running it through its paces with 4K footage, Blu-ray movies and Playstation 3 games. After spending a day with it, was it the type of thing I honestly wanted to set up in my living room?

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Sure, it's not really new, and it's almost certainly not the bggest printer in the world, but the HP DesignJet Z6100ps is still one of the largest and meanest looking printers I've ever seen - for some reason it reminds me of a Decepticon hungry for some human suffering.

The 120kg monster measures in at 197 x 96 x 135 cm and is compliant with HP's DreamColor technology, which allows it to recreate one billion colours and if you own a HP DreamColor monitor, what you see on screen is exactly what you'll get printed out, colour-wise.

As you can see the print outs are huge, and the quality is pretty sweet. And if you want to own one for yourself (perhaps for some form of world-domination plot), they cost about $US12,495.

Alexandra Lerman has sent us her short documentary on the GreenPix Zero Energy Media Wall, the mahoosive 24,000-square-foot fully (2,200m2) solar powered LED-panel wall at the Xicui entertainment complex. Like everything that has been happening in China these days, it's the first time that something of this scale--the LED panels are huge, as you can see after the jump--and features has been done. The results are as stunning as the rest of the Olympic Games.

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Meridian's 810 projector boldly claims to be the Reference Video System, and after seeing it for myself I think that's a fair assessment. The US$185,000 box (that's right!) uses specially calibrated JVC D-ILA light engine panels to deliver a resolution of 4096 x 2400 pixels, or put simply, 10-freaking-megapixels. Compare that to 1080i's one paltry MP of resolution, or 1080p full HD's skimpy 2MP. So how does the 810 do its magic? With a very unique scaling engine.

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The Dallas Cowboys will be taking over the world's largest video screen crown from that Japanese race track in 2009. Their HDTV will be a total of 11,200 square feet—actually bigger than when they were talking about this back in 2006—which beats the 8,066 sqft. Tokyo Racetrack one by quite a large margin. If 48.5m by 21.5 metres is too big to comprehend, imagine how long four busses would be if they're parked end to end. A cheerleader nipslip would turn into Mount Vesuvius. [Dallas News - Thanks Travis!]

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