Digital Home Thoughts: CeBIT 2004 Press Event News

Lexmark showed off their B&W Laser printer, capable of printing 24 ppm.







But more impressive were the Lexmark inkjet printers. There were three of them. The first one is a 4-in-1 unit (fax, print, copy, scan) with ink cartridges retailing for about $25 each (color and black). The next unit is their 3-in-1 (no faxing) but it only prints about 200 pages per ink cartridge. The last printer is a standalone printer, very similar to the second model with very similar specs. However it is going to retain for $99. For a sub $100 printer, it seems like a fantastic deal. The ink, again, is around $25 (black and color).





Jasc showed their Paint Shop Pro and Photo Album software. Nothing extraordinary worth commenting here. They looks like solid pieces of software, something we have come to expect from Jasc. I wish I could have spent more time with them but again, far too many people around this booth.







Kodak showed their 3, 4 and 5 MP cameras. The 4MP camera is the D series which the 3 and 5MP cameras are from the C series. The D series offers the ability to set shutter priority and other manual features thus making it slightly more expensive at just around $350.



Ahh, the final booth at the Metropolitan Pavilion - Xerox. They amazed me with their printer that takes solid state toner. The tones is in the shape of cubes that you can load into the toner slots, much like you would load staples in a stapler. The printer really gives some incredibly vivid colors when printing, a very different effect from laser or ink printers. It is a cross between a glossy and a matte finish. I was pleasantly surprised.







There was a second event held at the Web2Zone where we were taken by limo. This one was organized by Shuttle, in conjunction with ATI and Western Digital. More booze, food, and a ton of Shuttle machines, all maxed out with hardware and loaded with Unreal Tournament 2004. I enjoyed playing on these machine. Also, I finally got to play around with the Small Form Factor, of which Jason is a huge proponent. The Shuttles are really cute, and came with 250GB 10000rpm WD drives and ATI 9800 video card. Pity that there weren't any x800's. (The other disappointment was that all the Shuttle PCs there were loaded with only 256MB RAM thus severely hindering performance). Shuttle gave specs on their Media Center PC which I will post on further after my visit to CeBIT tomorrow. And Shuttle also showed their portable LCD monitor (pictured above). With the portable LCD and the obviously portable Shuttle, they are seriously targeting the LAN gaming market.

Some final thoughts, there wasn't as much new stuff as I was hoping to see. Companies like Canon, Nikon, Microsoft, were a no-show. I am really hoping that tomorrow's event, i.e. the actual CeBIT show will have more companies and am actually also hoping that some of them may make announcements of new product.