Projectors come in many different shapes and sizes. Each projector is aimed at a specific usage scenario from giving presentations in the boardroom or office to watching HD movies on a massive screen in the home. Sanyo announced its latest professional projector today that is appropriate for movies and more.

The projector is called the PDG-DHT100L and it offers full 1080p resolution. The single chip DLP projector uses a dual lamp system for increased light output when needed and has a user changeable twin color wheel system that increases color reproduction.

One thing that many projectors have in common is large size, high cost, and long startup/shut down times. The startup and shutdown times can be a big hassle if you are in a hurry to get a presentation or movie going or in a hurry to get home after a big presentation is done.

Sanyo has introduced a new projector called the PLC-XW57 that is very portable with dimensions of (W x H x D) 13-inches x 3.15-inches x 9.3-inches and weighs 6.4 pounds. Despite the smaller size of the projector, it has 2000 lumens of brightness and a 1.2x optical zoom short throw lens. Fast start up allows the projector to work with a cold bulb and users don’t have to wait for the bulb to cool at shutdown.

If you want a really big picture for your home theater, there are several ways to go about it. You can spend tens of thousands on a really big LCD of plasma TV screen. That’s far outside the capability of most of us. Or you can opt for a projector and get about 100-inches or more of home theater goodness.

Sanyo has announced a new projector called the PLV-Z3000 that would make for a great home theater. The Z3000 can throw an image 100-inches from 10 to 20 feet away from the screen. The projector also features the first utilization of 5:5 pull down that allows users to watch broadcast TV and more in movie theater quality.

Projectors can be used for all sorts of things from projecting that boring PowerPoint project at the office to playing some Warcraft with a 100-inches of gaming glory on your living room wall. The catch is that often projectors are bulky devices that cost a lot of money.

Sanyo introduced a new projector today that it claims to be the industries smallest and lightest XGA LCD projector. The PLC-XW60 has a resolution of 1024 x 768 and weighs only 3.6 pounds. It’s not only light, but it is physically small as well with dimensions of 10.4 x 2.17 x 7.40 inches (WxHxD).

[UPDATE: Turns out this phone has actually been out for awhile. Shame to Sanyo for dating the press release for this week!]

Sanyo and Sprint together have announced from CES the availability of an upgraded model of the popular Katana cell phone. The new one is known as the Sanyo Katana DLX and it’s priced at around $130 with mail in rebate and two year contract.

The Sanyo Katana DLX is optimized for broadband related Sprint multimedia content. It is available in several body colors and offers features like phone as a modem, Bluetooth, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera built in and support for microSDHC memory cards.

Sanyo has launched the new Xacti DMX-HD700, solid state based high-def camcorder today touted by the company as the world’s “smallest and lightest” 720p camcorder. It has the ability to record 720p video for as long as two continuous hours on the batteries and can store up to 2 hours and 46 minutes of full-resolution video in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 format on an 8GB SDHC card.

The new Xacti and can also take 7.1 megapixal still photos through the 5x optical zoom lens and can track and focus on up to 12 faces with its Face Chaser feature. It even has a decent sized viewer for the size of the camera with a 2.7-inch LCD display that flips open. It also has an HDMI output built-in and comes bundled with Adobe’s Premiere Elements 3 to get you ready to take and edit high-def videos right out of the box. It’s expected to be in stores by the end of October and comes in colors of brown, red and silver for a very reasonable $600.

You ever notice there’s always a “smallest and lightest” something or rather being announced by CE manufacturers? The newest gadget to fall into this category is the Sanyo Xacti HD1000, the “world’s smallest and lightest full HD digital camcorder.”

The Sanyo Xacti HD1000, priced at around $800 and due out in September, weighs 9.5 ounces and has a total volume of 16.6 cubic inches. It’s capable of full 1080i HD video recorded in the AVC/H.264 standard and sports a 2.7-inch widescreen display. Sanyo is also proud of this camcorder’s hardware and software interface for file saving and television playback.

What happens when a Japanese electronics manufacturer gets back to the basics when teaming up with a Japanese PHS operator? Something only Sanyo and Willcom could produce, The Wilcon!

This little gem of technology has a battery that is capable of 250 standby hours and 5 hours of talk-time. What kind of special battery is this you ask? A single AAA battery, making this the first ever cell phone to have such a power source. Now if only they could make the device a little more aesthetically pleasing and bring it stateside I’d have a phone to recommend to all those people who complain about having extra “bells and whistles”.

But this phone is so basic it ironically almost makes up for the lack of features. The Wilcon, however, will not work on 3g networks.

via AkihabaraNews

Sanyo today dropped two new portable navigation systems into the U.S. market. The more interesting looking of these two is the feature-laden Sanyo Easy Street NVM-4070.

The Sanyo Easy Street NVM-4070, to start with, has a nice looking four-inch widescreen display which is touch-sensitive. You get text-to-speech, turn by turn navigation (including street names announced), pre-installed maps which include 1.8 million points of interest spread across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Canada and the ability to get real time traffic updates that are graphically displayed as icons on the map.

Sanyo has announced that the Xacti CG6 digital camcorder is finally set for its US release toward the end of March. This tiny, pocket-sized 6 ounce still/video camera works well for decent on-the-go video recording without having to haul around a standard size camcorder.

The Xacti CG6 has a 6 megapixel CCD with a 5X optical zoom lens through which video and still pictures can be taken, viewed through a 2.5 inch fold-out LCD screen. The camera supports widescreen shots and even has real-time interpolation for 10-megapixel (3680×2760) high-resolution recording.

The camera also has a fairly quick and easy to use interface, providing voice prompts for menus and allowing on camera video editing when memory allows. Data can be transferred to and from your computer via USB 2.0 and the CG6 supports PictBridge as well.

SDHC-compatibility was added to the Xacti CG6 to handle up to an …

Sanyo had introduced a handy little gadget to recharge batteries using solar power. The Eneloop solar charger will recharge 4 AA batteries using nothing but the sun. It also has a port to let you charge other devices with rechargeable batteries via a USB connection.

At the same time Sanyo has also released a small, hand held heater that is also rechargeable, and works similarly to the small little liquid packets you would put inside your gloves at the slopes, creating a small amount of heat radiant heat.

Along with the solar recharger from Sanyo, don’t forget that you can charge up the Sanyo Eneloop rechargeable NiMH batteries. The novel feature of these batteries is not that they are rechargeable, which they are, but that they hold there charge a lot longer than normal rechargeable batteries when not being used. So much so that …