Tag: expensive
Denon DVD-A1UD high-end universal Blu-ray player
Okay, I’ll have to admit I asked for this a bit. In my last post about Denon Blu-ray players I demanded to know what Denon would describe as ‘high-end’, after their ‘entry-level’ player cost £600.
Well, this is it. It’s the catchily-named DVD-A1UD, and it’ll play back Blu-ray discs, Super Audio CD (SACD), DVD-Audio, DVD-Video and plain old CDs. The DVD-A1UD is the replacement for the Denon’s previous universal DVD player – the DVD-A1XV. Full specs are over the jump.
It costs a massive £3,300. I can safely say that I don’t know anyone who’d splash out £3,300 on a DVD player, but someone must, or they wouldn’t make the damn thing. It’s going to show up across Europe in March 2009, in either a silver or black finish. Who knows, perhaps by then you’ll be rolling around in pots of money. Denon can only hope.
Porsche Design P'9522 mobile phone launches
This is the Porsche P’9522 – a mobile phone designed by Porsche. I can hear you already thinking ‘it’s got an expensive name on it – the features are going to be practically non-existent’. Well, tell your thoughts that they’re wrong, and should shut up – it’s actually surprisingly high-specced.
The phone case is milled from a single solid aluminum block and a single sheet of scratchproof glass! It’s got a 2.8″ touchscreen OLED display! It’s got built-in Wi-Fi and GPS! It’s got a fingerprint scanner! A fingerprint scanner, for god’s sake!
The bad news? You’re not going to get this in the Carphone Warehouse or Phones 4 U. It’s being sold in Porsche shops and ‘exclusive specialist stores’ only. There’s no price quoted, but we’ll have to assume it’s going to be more than its predecessor, the fliptastic P’9521, which costs €1200 (just over £1000).
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The D3X – Nikon unveils a 24.5 megapixel beast
Here’s the whopping D3X, straight outta Nikon’s ‘Pro’ magazine. The spec sheet surfaced over the weekend, which includes a 24.5 megapixel sensor, and full-resolution shooting at five frames per second – necessitating a newly updated ‘EXPEED’ image processing system to keep pace.
Hadron Collider repairs to cost £14m
Turns out that fixing the slight liquid helium leak down below Geneva earlier this year is going to cost rather more than the vase you knocked over at Auntie Flo’s house when you were 13, which cost you all your pocket money for the following three months. To be precise, the exact cost of fixing the LHC is £14 million.
The team behind it also say that “realistically”, it’s going to take until next summer before things are up and running again. Originally, we thought that it’d be going again around now, but the damage was more severe than the team realised. Most concerningly of all, the cost of fixing the thing ‘falls within CERN’s budget’. Damn – that’s one hell of a budget.
Related posts: OPINION: The Large Hadron Collider goes live tomorrow – fingers crossed | Teen suicide over LHC Apocalypse fears; let’s rename the beast
RUMOUR: iTunes to add DRM-free Sony music
SonyBMG, soon to be Sony Music Entertainment Inc, is one of the four major music labels, and features bands and artists like the Ting Tings, AC/DC and Dido. If rumours are correct, then music from those bands and many others will soon be available on the iTunes store DRM-free.
Currently, EMI are the only major label to offer MP3 files on iTunes Plus – Apple’s name for their DRM-free, slightly higher quality, offering that costs 25% more per track than DRMed files. If Sony’s music is added, it will be a plus for Apple, but they still lag far far behind services like 7digital, who are 100% DRM-free, and remain my a la carte MP3 download provider of choice.
While we’re at it, do you know what the most downloaded catalogue song ever on iTunes is? Soundscan, over the weekend, determined that it’s the epic “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey. Classic. I’ve embedded a video of them playing it live just after the jump. Power Ballads first thing on a Monday morning are just what everyone needs.
Luxury screen cleaning fluid – for the geek who has everything
Just when you think you’ve seen every luxury product, another one comes along. This time we’ve got luxury screen cleaning fluid, and it comes in what looks like perfume bottles.
The manufacturers warn that using alcohol-based cleaning products can cause irreparable harm to LCD screens. They’ve formulated an alcohol-free, water-based cleaner that won’t cause any damage to your expensive 42″ plasma.
On the left, you’ve got the “Eazy Care”, which comes in black or white, and costs £20. On the right is the “One Care”, which costs £15. Refills are available for either for just £6. If either float your boat, then pick up a bottle at Currys or John Lewis.
AM Denmark Screen Cleaners
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Time to wonder if you have too much money?
When those city fatcats were busy destroying the global financial system, throwing around money like it was going out of fashion, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were signing their cheques with a pen like this.
Caran d’Ache’s 1010 is a $19,000 pen, and rather than just being covered in expensive metals like other expensive tat, this is themed around the “special genius of watchmakers”… So the obvious thing was to express this in fountain pen form.
Ballesteros Golf Watch gives me a Seve
Feel like owning a piece of golfing history? Currently lacking a watch? If you fall into the centre of that rather obscure Venn diagram, then what you need is the Seve Ballesteros golf watch pictured above. It’s made of the bits of the golf clubs that ol’ Seve used in his five under par victory at the Chunichi Crown Open in Japan back in 1991.
Of course, there’s only so many clubs that Ballesteros used back then, nine irons, a pitching wedge and a sand wedge, to be precise, so the watch comes in a limited edition of 50. It’s got a hole counter and a stroke counter, though the stroke counter only goes up to ten. It’ll be released in November, and cost a whopping 21,500 Swiss Francs (£11,340). Each comes with the name of the club used to make it engraved on the back.
Seve Ballesteros Golf Watch (via Gizmag)
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Motorola Aura – luxury phone with the first circular display
Blimey. Sometimes stuff leaks very very early, other times you don’t see it till it’s nearly out. This certainly falls into the latter category. It’s a more-than-a-little-ridiculous new phone from Motorola. “Luxury” doesn’t come close – this phone has more than 700 individual components, a 62-carat sapphire crystal lens, and the world’s first 16 million colour, circular display with 300 dpi resolution.
I’m feeling a little breathless right now, so here’s what Motorola has to say about the device:
Combining superb craftsmanship and a distinctive interface, AURA delivers a sensory experience that is second to none for those with refined tastes. From the moment AURA owners pick up their devices, they elevate their own experience in luxury and unmatched quality.
Imerge MS1 high-end media server – holds six terabytes of Spongebob episodes
It’s high-end audio time now, with the announcement of the Imerge MS1 home server. It’s a media server which, when combined with a storage system like XiVA’s three and six terabyte disc arrays, will give you a very high-quality audio and video streaming solution over a network…
