New Products

COOL FACTOR It's nice to see other portable media players keeping up with the iPod, and Toshiba's gigabeat S Series has comparable video chops: a crisp 21/2-inch screen with 320 x 240-pixel resolution.

SERVICE CENTER Harman Kardon's first media server takes your discs and makes them better. Any CD you feed it will be ripped to the convenient 160-GB hard disk. Any DVD you feed it will be upconverted to 720p HD format through the HDMI output. But streaming is this box's main mission: four rooms, four streams - mix 'em however you want.

Keep It Real It's kind of a bizarre resolution for a plasma TV - 1,024 x 1,080 pixels - but Hitachi just might know what it's doing here. Those 1 million pixels are driven by a technology called ALiS (Alternate Lighting of Surfaces) to get the most detail out of 1080i signals (the most common HD format) and bestow a smoother, more filmlike picture.

ALL ABOARD Now that your PC is full of photos, music, and videos (all legally downloaded, of course), they need a place to be appreciated. HP's MediaSmart LCD TV lets them bust out on its 37-inch display, streaming all your PC goodies through your home network or a Wi-Fi connection.

ROUND SOUND Don't think of the radial as an iPod speaker dock - it's more befitting to call it an iPod stage, encircling the player with curved 60-watt speakers to bust out your tunes, but keeping the iPod front and center to remind everyone who's really the star of the show.

NO FOOTAGE JVC's Everio camcorders ditch those archaic videotapes in favor of recording to a hard disk. The 30 gigs onboard the flagship model will hold 10.5 hours of DVD-quality material - captured in eye-catching color, thanks to the three CCD image sensors (cheaper cams have just one).

LEAN AND SO MEAN The leading 58-inch plasma panel costs 5 grand and can't even display a 1080p signal without downconverting it to 720p. Seems like JVC's got it all figured out with its new slim HD-ILA LCoS HDTV. For $3,300, you get a crisp 58-inch 1080p screen in a cabinet just 10.8 inches deep that goes flush against a wall and can even be wall-mounted.