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Pioneer's Touchscreen Car Stereo Doubles as a Backseat Driver

Bart Salisbury — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:00:15 -0600

Innovate or die is a definite theme emerging from this year’s CES, and nowhere is this more apparent than with car navigation systems. In-car satnav is the ultimate uni-tasker, and now that smartphones are capable of doing this, they’re falling out of favor. Pioneer hopes to alter this trend a bit with the introduction of the AVIC-X920BT, a true multi-tasking beast.

The AVIC-X920BT is a double-DIN head unit that bundles together satnav, radio/CD, and iPod connectivity (via USB), voice recognition, and the first implementation of Pandora Internet radio. It has a 6.1-inch WXVGA screen (800 x 600 pixels), 3D graphics acceleration, DVD play-back, built-in Bluetooth, 4 GB of internal memory, an micro-SD card slot, and Pioneer’s proprietary MusicSphere interface. (MusicSphere has an iTunes plug-in for analyzing music libraries and creating specialized playlists based on certain musical attributes.) The AVIC-X920BT is also satellite radio-ready.

The navigation system uses the Tele Atlas with coverage of the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii), and Canada. It contains over 12 million points of interest, and uses an enhanced voice recognition system for input. It also has an ECO Driving feature that makes use of driving status reports when routing, to reduce environmental impact. (Companion PC software, AVIC FEEDS, will provide detailed information on trips, including an analysis of driving habits, which are used to generate suggestions on how to improve fuel efficiency.)

The AVIC-X920BT will be available in April, and will have a suggested retail price of $1,200.

Image Credit: Pioneer

Japanese Researchers Demonstrate Cellphone Gesture Recognition

Bart Salisbury — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:44:40 -0600

Interface technology experiments are fascinating. True, almost none of them pan out, but it's still fun to see what sort of ideas people come up with. Take for example a recent demonstration by researchers at the Ishikiawa Komuro Laboratory, University of Tokyo, where users can interface with a cell phone with a simple wag of their finger.

The technology is built around a high speed camera, running at 154 frames per second, which captures finger position and movement in 3D, and translates it, using a “Lucas-Kanade Algorithm”, into actions. For example, rather than tapping a screen, a user could tap air to type or dial a phone number. And to scroll through a list of pictures or contact entries would require a similar swipe through the air--no touching the phone required.

Tim Hornyak, writing on the Crave Gadget Blog for Cnet, says this example of a “gestural interface” follows work by MIT (SixthSense), Toshiba, and Pioneer. Still, it raises the question: what’s the point? Touchscreens, while at times greasy, work well enough to get the job done. Like VHS beat out Beta, a more sophisticated interface technology won’t win out by virtue of its technical superiority--it has to fulfill a distinctly perceived purpose. Wagging your finger at your iPhone doesn’t seem to be a compelling enough reason.

Still, as we begin to place greater demands on mobile devices, it may be possible that the 2D world of the touchscreen will need replacement. In that case, a 3D option, such as this one, may well make an appearance in the marketplace.

Image Credit: Ishikiawa Komuro Laboratory

Pioneer BDR-2203

Katherine Stevenson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:30:00 -0500

8x Blu-ray burner redeems itself

In our July issue, we reviewed OWC’s Mercury Pro 8x Blu-ray External and found the drive’s performance puzzling. In short, the Mercury Pro’s BD-R write speeds belied its 8x rating, with the drive taking nearly an hour to fill a 25GB disc with data, compared with the 22-plus minutes it took LG’s 6x GBW-H20L. It got us wondering whether the issues were more the fault of OWC’s external enclosure or the Pioneer 8x Blu-ray drive at its heart.

This month we were able to answer that question as we tested Pioneer’s BDR-2203, the same drive used in the Mercury Pro. We immediately cut to the chase, testing the BDR-2203’s BD-R write performance. While the Mercury Pro was incompatible with the Nero DiscSpeed app we use for our optical drive tests—forcing us to use Nero 8’s Burn Express instead—the BDR-2203 had no such problems. Using DiscSpeed along with 4x Verbatim media, the drive wrote 22.5GB of data to a BD-R disc in 14:56 (min:sec)—a Lab record!—maintaining 8x speeds through much of the job. With rewriteable media, the drive’s performance wasn’t quite as impressive. The BDR-2203 held a steady 2x speed when filling a 25GB BD-RE disc, for a time of 45:35, much like the Mercury Pro—and 15 percent slower than the LG GBW-H20L’s BD-RE write time.

It doesn't look like much, but the BDR-2203 blows away the competition when writing to Blu-ray discs.

With standard DVD media, the BDR-2203’s performance was pretty much in line with the Mercury Pro’s—and that’s not a bad thing. While neither drive toppled the GBW-H20L in DVD+R speeds, all three were virtually tied: Pioneer’s internal drive wrote 4.38GB of data to a single-layer disc in 6:06 compared with the external drive’s time of 6:16 and the LG drive’s time of 5:43. On the other hand, both the Mercury Pro and the BDR-2203 surpassed the GBW-H20L in our DVD-ripping benchmark, with scores that were 50 percent faster than the LG drive’s.

In the end, not only did Pioneer’s BDR-2203 prove that it wasn’t to blame for the Mercury Pro’s BD-R issues, it succeeded in unseating LG’s GBW-H20L as our Blu-ray burner of choice. After all, who wouldn’t want BD-R write times that are 30 percent faster for a comparable price, along with solid performance in all other areas?

Pioneer Shows 400GB Blu-ray Disc, Promises 1TB Disc by 2013

Andy Salisbury — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:25:46 -0600

While the news of the 400GB Pioneer disc isn’t necessarily new, the fact that it’s made it to production is. Just today at the IT Month fair in Taiwan, Pioneer announced that their 400GB Blu-ray disc would be hitting mass production sometime in 2010.

The disc’s ability to pack so much storage is all thanks to a breakthrough in the material used to create reflective layers. According to Pioneer High Fidelity Taiwan, this also allows the pick-up head of the disc to match that of current Blu-ray technology, allowing the discs to be played using current drives.

Pioneer’s plan to release the disc to the public in 2010 is followed swiftly by the release of rewritable discs in 2010-2012. Though, 1TB discs will quickly follow in 2013, according to the current roadmap.

Image Credit: Jimmy Hsu, Digitimes

Samsung Slapped with $59.3 Million Verdict in Pioneer Suit

Paul Lilly — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:39:32 -0600

Pioneer has to be feeling giddy following its most recent court victory. Pioneer had accused Samsung of willfully infringing on two of its patents -- U.S. Patent Numbers 5,182,489 and 5,640,068 -- covering plasma display technology. It took an eight-day trial to convince Hon. David J. Folsom in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall, who awarded Pioneer with a $59 million verdict, part of which covers lost profits and royalties.

"We are very pleased with the jury's finding," says Mr. Baxter of McKool Smith, the firm who represented Pioneer. "This was a complicated case and we were fortunate to have jurors that closely examined the facts before reaching their verdict."

And fortunate Pioneer was. The jury ruled in favor of the company on every count brought against Samsung. Not surprisingly, Samsung has yet to comment on the ruling.

Image Credit: Flickr Joe Gratz

Pioneer to Offer Blu-ray Recorders

Pulkit Chandna — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:52:51 -0500

Pioneer has to its credit a $145 Blu-ray player - on sale only in China, perhaps the cheapest BRD player in the world. However, it was a tad watchful during the course of the format war. Now with Blu-ray having emerged victorious, Pioneer is making a deeper commitment to it. It has announced plans to launch Blu-ray recorders by the end of the year in Japan. The recorders will be developed with some help from its minority owner Sharp (14% stake), which is amongst the six Japanese majors currently offering Blu-ray recorders.

Image Credit: Pioneer

Pioneer Presses World's First 16-Layer Optical Disc

Paul Lilly — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:15:18 -0500

Following Hitachi's annoucement of plans to hit 5TB in a single hard drive by 2010, Pioneer follows suit by proclaiming a major advancement in the optical storage arena with an unprecedented 16-layer optical disc capable of storing 400GB. Presumably intended for distribution as Blu-ray media, Pioneer points out the new disc's 25GB per-layer capacity is the same as that of a Blu-ray disc (BD).

Cross-talk among multiple layers has been a stickling point in the optical industry, but Pioneer claims to have tackled the problem with a specialized disc structure designed to reduce interference from adjacent layers. And what about compatibility with existing Blu-ray players? Pioneer says that because the optical specifications of the lens are the same as those for existing BD discs, there shouldn't be any compatibility concerns between the new 16-layer discs and existing BD media.

Dampening the announcement, the 16-layer discs are read-only. That may change in time, but for the here and now, you'll still need to resort to standard discs or HDDs to store your epic music collection, downloaded videos, and other legally acquired data. Of course, finding someone who owns a Blu-ray drive capable of burning BD discs is more rare than spotting a MacBook victory at Maximum PC.

Image Credit: Pioneer

Blu-ray Makes Giant Strides with 6X Media and $145 Player

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:20:37 -0500

The Blu-ray scene is lightning up and these latest developments prove that:

Panasonic’s 6x Blu-ray Media: Panasonic has unveiled the first ever 6x Blu-ray disc media. It breezes at a data transfer speed of 27MB/sec making it 30 % brisker than 16x DVDs and four times as fast as 48x CDs. But it will only be in September that the 6x Blu-ray becomes widely available in Japan and, hopefully, soon after that in other parts of the world. Panasonic’s 16x Blu-ray disc has two variants, one with a capacity of 25GB and the other with 50GB space.

Pioneer’s $145 Blu-ray player: The days of the exorbitantly priced PS3 being the cheapest Blu-ray player are all but history. Blu-ray player prices are falling and Pioneer has pioneered a major price drop, albeit in China. The manufacturer has more than halved the price of its BDC-SO2BKZ in China. One year ago, the player debuted in China at an asking price of $300, which has now been reduced to $145. It is only a matter of time when other manufacturers follow suit and when that happens Blu-ray players will become absolutely irresistible.

Image Credit: Cnet