Hitachi is looking to take advantage of the education market, so the company has developed some new electronic blackboards. New and improved versions of the transformed PX-DUO-50 electronic blackboards will be resurrected in each of the elementary and junior high schools in Japan. Costing about ¥700,000, the electronic blackboards have a PC built-in and use a detection device consisting of two infrared cameras, with the lens having a field angle of 170°.

Measuring 50-inches, the blackboards support all of the character input and character recognition that teachers need and come with a terrestrial digital TV tuner.

Hitachi has released the SimpleTough and SimpleDrive Mini USB drives, along with SimpleNet. At $79, SimpleNet is a useful little USB to Ethernet box that turns the SimpleTough or SimpleDrive into a network attached storage (NAS) device on your local network.

SimpleNet works wirh non-Hitachi drives too. The USB drive appears as a drive on the network so you can easily share your pics, movies, tunes and documents with everyone on your network.

The Hitachi HP-CN12 bean-shaped ear canal earphones come in eight different colors. The earphones work on a frequency zone of 20Hz – 22kHz and deliver and impedance of 16-Ohms. And they’re shaped like beans, which may help them to stay in place.

The HP-CN12 also features a slider that adjusts the length of the wire and prevents it from getting tangled up. They are pretty unique earphones. Expect them to be launched in Japan on July 24th for 1500 Yen (or $17).

Hitachi is back with some new LCD HDTV product lines in the form of the UltraVision and Alpha series. Ultravision features the best picture quality, the latest 1080p technology, support for up to 8 High Definition inputs, with five HDMI pure digital inputs. It also boasts a trim and light design that is easy to swivel for any viewing position you need, as well as an ENERGY STAR qualification. A built-in ATSC/QAM/NTSC tuner lets users access their HD channels easily.

The Alpha series will give you four HDMI pure digital inputs, three HD inputs, a similar ENERGY STAR qualification, RGB input and a swivel stand.

Saving a few watts by using a more energy efficient hard drive isn’t high on the list of priorities for most businesses and your average computer user. The savings in electricity for most of us won’t offset the cost of replacing a hard drive. However, for large data centers saving a few watts per hard drive can equate to millions of dollars.

Hitachi has announced its latest energy efficient hard drive aimed at the enterprise market called the Ultrastar C10K300. The drive spins at 10,000 RPM and connects to servers via an SAS interface. The drive has a 2.5-inch form factor helping to save space in crowded server environments.

There is nothing that makes most consumers angrier than having to pay more for something than it is worth. A few years ago several of the world’s largest LCD panel makers conspired together to fix the price of TFT-LCD panels and sold the panels at inflated prices to computer makers.

So far several companies have been fined, including LG and Chunghwa Picture Tubes. Today the U.S. DOJ has announced that Hitachi has agreed to plead guilty and pay a fine of $31 million for its part in the LCD price fixing conspiracy.

Japanese cell phone maker KDDI has teamed up with Hitachi to one-up your iPhone as the iPhone can’t manage 3D content. The Hitachi WOOO H001 will show you 3D versions of your phone’s still images and video.

But that’s not all, the phone also will give you a 5 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, microSD slot, and a 1Seg TV tuner. No word on price, but the handset should hit the Asian market by spring.

There are many uses today for hard drives optimized for storing and streaming video files. Uses for this type of drive include DVRs, video work stations, and video surveillance applications. Hitachi has announced its latest video centric drive that is added to its CinemaStar line.

The new drive is called the CinemaStar C5K500 and is a 2.5-inch drive offering a maximum capacity of 500GB. The small drive is designed for silent operation, cool running, and low power usage. The rotational speed of the drive is 5400 rpm and is uses Hitachi SmoothStream technology to enhance digital video streaming applications.

The future of touch and gesture interface technology continues it’s rapid march forward, but traditional hardware interface devices are still making improvements. Hitachi recently showed off a new kind of television remote control specifically designed for the computer savvy needs of IPTV viewers. It may look like a crystal ball, but it won’t…or maybe it will reveal the future.

The idea is to get away from all of those buttons and make the process of using an onscreen GUI an intuitively simple process. Which is how it should be. No word yet on release date or price, but we are hoping to see it soon. Regular TV remotes are so last century.

Hitachi isn’t a name you hear as often in the consumer electronics realm as Sony or Samsung. Despite that, Hitachi makes some fantastic home theater and AV products. I own one of their plasma TVs and it is by far the best set I have tested. Hitachi is branching into the professional market with its latest AV projector.

The projector is called the CP-X10000 and offers a whopping 7,500 lumens of brightness and a contrast ratio of 2500:1. The projector offers ultra-wide range lens shift and a 10-bit full digital video processor along with a 10,000-hour filter.

Storage capacities are growing for both desktop and portable computers. Notebooks still can’t match the storage capacity available in many desktop computers, but the gap is closing. Hitachi announced its latest notebook HDD today that offers lots of storage and green features built-in.

The hard drive is called the Travelstar 5K500.B and has 500GB of storage space wile consuming only 1.4W during read/write operations. The drives are also halogen free making them more environmentally friendly.

The Japanese are ahead of us in everything, even Fridge tech. Not only do they like to spray snow to deodorize things, they also like their fridges to emit vitamin C. Hitachi fridges, that is. The idea behind their new fridges seems sound enough. The R-Y6000 releases Vitamin C into the air inside to keep your food fresher.

Apparently this is possible because Vitamin C helps meat keep it’s color longer and also slows down nutrient loss in vegetables and fish. The wonder fridge also has a filter to help prevent mold. And six drawers. We typically have two here. It has a volume of 602 liters and will cost $3,100. 3,000 units will be produced on a monthly basis, until they run out of vitamin C and have to resort to squeezing oranges inside.

Hitachi’s annouced it’s tri-format Blu-ray camcorder, the DZ-BD10HA, along with a list-price. It uses a 7-megapixel CMOS sensor that’s capable of both full 1920 x 1080 High Definition images and video. It can record directly onto either 8cm Blu-ray discs, the 30GB hard-drive, or onto an SDHC memory card.

One nice feature is that footage on the hard-drive or SDHC card can be re-dubbed to the Blu-ray drive without having to hook up to a computer, if you want to split, splice, delete, merge, and transition etc. It will also convert footage into standard definition and burn to a DVD if that’s what you want. There’s a lot to like here. Including the price which is a surprisingly reasonable $999. It will be available in September 2008.

Hard drive capacities are growing all the time, which is great news for computer users with lots of stuff to store. More storage capacity is also great news for DVR users looking to be able to record more programming before their hard drive fills up.

Today Hitachi announced a pair of new hard drives in its CinemaStar line. The flagship product is the CinemaStar 7K1000.B with up to 1TB of storage space. Hitachi previously announced a 1TB desktop drive a few weeks back. Other capacities are available for the 7K1000.B in addition to the 1TB version. Hitachi also announced the CinemaStar 5K320 with 320GB of storage space. The 1TB drive can store 247 hours of MPEG-4 HD video.

We’ve seen E ink used on watch faces, but did you expect to see it on your phone? E Ink is thinking about introducing it’s E Ink Vixplex Imaging Film for the outer display in future clamshell handsets. Pretty cool idea and very easily done since e-ink only consumes power when the image changes.

The first two handsets that will feature the technology are the Hitachi W61 and the Casio Model G’zOne. The displays are said to be clearly visible even under direct sunlight, which gives the user a viewing angle of up to 180-degrees. It’s sure to be a big hit as users love to personalize their phones.