Sharp has unveiled a stunning 26-foot-tall Christmas tree made of 43 Aquos LCD televisions, which sizes ranging from 19 to 52 inches. The gigantic TV tree is located in New York's Grand Central Station, where people can not only admire its coordinated decoration animations, created by Japanese video artist Tsuyoshi Takashiro, but also register to win one of the Aquos panels in the tree. If you are a New Yorker and need another reason to go to Grand Central, Sharp will also donate one dollar per registered person to a program that trains people in environmental jobs. [PopSci]

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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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One of the big reasons that Blu-ray isn't gaining the same traction as DVDs (aside from the required spend on compatible hardware and cost of both the players and movies) is the fact that there have been several different, confusingly named standards. While we've been over it before and know the differences between the different BD profiles, it still bugs the hell out of us to see a product launch that announces that it's "Final Standard Profile" when there's nothing "Final" about it. Which is exactly what the latest player from Sharp does.

The Sharp BD-HP21X offers "Final Standard Profile", which lets you watch Picture-in-Picture during playback of your Blu-ray movie. There's no BD-Live support for those of you with compatible BD-Live movies (like Iron Man), meaning you'll never be able to access all that extra downloadable content unless you buy a new player.

It's not all bad - there's a quick start mode and the player only pulls in 0.5W of power in standby, but for the same price as this $499 unit you can pick up Sony or Panasonic's latest players which do do BD-Live. And that's where we'd suggest you put your money, if you're in a Blu-ray buying mood.

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It's not every day that you get to check out the world's thinnest LCD HDTV, let alone all three "ultrathins" currently in production, but that's what's going down. Sharp's super insane new flagship, the Limited Edition Aquos LC-65XS1U-S, arrived at my door in a bulletproof shipping container, 138 pounds of metal and glass measuring 65 inches diagonal that you can barely see from the side. Yes, in spite of its full-frontal gravitas, it measures only an inch thick at its edge, and a slightly more flexed 2 inches in the middle. It's gorgeous and ridiculous and designed to hang on a wall with no more protrusion than a dainty sketch in a frame—only it can blast Casino Royale at 1080p, 24 frames per second, while your face melts, and I'd have to sell my car twice over to buy it.

I love you Giz readers too much to stop with something that none of us can actually afford—and if you can afford it, you'll be decent enough to not let us know—so I called in the new slender 1080p models from Hitachi and JVC, too. As much lower-priced sets, I thought they'd just be the icing on Sharp's Limited Edition cake, but they turned out to be, in their own right, fine specimens. Let's review, shall we?

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After nearly three years of investigation, LG, Sharp and Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd have admitted to participating in a cartel between 2001 and 2006 that fixed prices of LCD screens affecting "millions of American consumers who use computers, cell phones and numerous other household electronics every day." The Justice Department has ordered the companies pony up $US580 million in fines—$US400 million from LG, $US120 million from Sharp and $US65 million from Chunghwa.

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In the early 1990s, Vanilla Ice was popular. That was not a good thing. I remember the DJ at my Year 6 dance played Ice, Ice Baby three times. Three times! Jerkoff!

Another thing that was popular back then was big, boxy stereo systems, complete with tape deck down below and CD drive up on top. This new $329 Hi-Fi from Sharp reminds me of them, except in the place of cassette slot is a dock for your iPod. It's even got the built-in AM/FM radio tuner, so when the thousands of tracks on your iPod and CDs aren't enough, you can tune into some radio station to listen to that crappy DJ play Ice, Ice Baby. Except now it's retro and cool, right? Wrong! Vanilla Ice will always be a tragedy (except for his cameo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze - that was awesome.)

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Sharp may not do much in terms of ePaper, but they know their way around an LCD. And they've just shown off a new type of eight-colour LCD that can hold a static image even when the power is cut.

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It's not available in the US, but Softbank customers will be able to snag the Aquos Fulltouch 931SH. It may look a lot like the iPhone, but this phone packs slide-out QWERTY along with a 3.8-inch touchscreen running at a crazy 1024x480 resolution. Not only is that as sharp as the HTC Touch HD—it's super wide screen, ready for 16x9 content. Of course the 931SH packs all sorts of other goodies, including a 1seg tuner and 5MP camera. But why should we tempt you more over something you cannot buy? [Softbank]

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If you're in the market for a new television and a Blu-Ray player, Sharp will help you kill two birds with one of its new Aquos DXs. The company has released a line of LCD TVs that have built-in Blu-Ray disc recorders, which they tout as an all-in-one solution for recording television onto BDs... in case there's television that's actually worth the trouble. The 16 sets in the Aquos DX line range from 26-inch to 52-inch models and cost between $US1,600 and $US4,900.

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There's so much wrong with the application of this technology that we won't even get started on it, but this Sharp television runs off the juice of a single attached solar panel. That's because the 52" LCD is illuminated by LEDs which coincidentally reduces its power draw to the same amount produced by that solar panel sitting on the floor.

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