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If you've been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to own the thinnest flat-panel LCD TV, now's your chance.

Hitachi's 1.5 LCDs are just that thick.

(Credit: Hitachi)

Though already available in Asia, the 1.5-inch-thick TVs from Hitachi are now available in the U.S. The sets come in three different screen sizes, 32 inches, 37 inches, and 42 inches.

One of the secrets, by the way, of how Hitachi managed to slim down the TVs so much is that they took out the ATSC tuner. And although it is definitely the thinnest LCD TV, it's downright bloated when compared to Sony's impossibly thin OLED TV, which measures a mere 3 millimeters thick.

See my colleague David Katzmaier's take on the latest TV from Hitachi here.

The recording DVD player. These have been popular in Europe and Asia but have fallen flat in the U.S. Most companies don't even bother to put much effort into marketing them in this country.

The same phenomenon will likely hold true for recording Blu-ray and HD DVD players.

Makato Ebata, CEO of the consumer business group at Hitachi, gave us an explanation in a recent interview. Cable TV penetration is far higher in the States than Asia or Europe. With cable, the same show can appear on a channel several times. In Europe and Japan, you need to grab it when you can.

"The non-recording DVD player is quite popular in this country (the U.S.), but they are not popular in Japan at all," he said. "Here, you use them for the rentals. In Japan, they use it for recording."

TiVo also took off more rapidly in the States and elsewhere. TiVo, he added, is also one of the reasons selling TVs with embedded hard drives in the States remains a challenge. Selling these on the other two continents is far easier. Consumers interested in digital video recorders (a) already own one or (b) have more options on how to put one in their living room.

Of course, the recording debate doesn't apply to video cameras. Americans are shifting from tape to disc and hard drive camcorders.

Other notes from Ebata:

IPTV will become a more dominant theme for TV manufacturers. All of the major manufacturers will add content providers and services to their sets. So far, the manufacturers are avoiding the mistake of putting the whole Web on your TV, and instead popping up windows for must-have information like local sports and weather, or entertainment modules with wide appeal.

The question, though, will be how TV manufacturers can earn money from providing content.

OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TV is great and the technology will likely come to market, but it will take years to figure out ways to mass-manufacture large sets. (Panasonic, Sharp, and Samsung hold a similar opinion, but Sony says you will see it quicker. More here on the debate.) Another challenge lies in the fact that LCD and plasma continue to come down in price.

Plasma will survive. It doesn't have as many manufacturing backers as LCD and the public perception isn't great, but it remains competitive for large TVs. Hitachi makes plasmas.

We haven't able to confirm this, but we've heard it now from a couple of people: Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate, is talking to Toshiba and Fujitsu about forming a new company dedicated to hard drives and storage systems.

The new company would combine the limping hard drive divisions of Hitachi and Toshiba as well as some of the storage systems technology from Fujitsu. Each would own a third.

The three-way deal is being proposed as an alternative to a private equity buyout. Hitachi has been in discussions with equity firm Silver Lake and others about spinning off its money-losing hard drive group, according to sources and news reports. Those talks, however, have not gone smoothly, sources familiar with the discussions said.

For one thing, Silver Lake has a long association with Seagate Technology. Silver Lake took Seagate private years ago, restructured the company, and spun it out again. Seagate is now profitable and growing. However, the firm and the company have stayed friends. Silver Lake founder Jim Davidson tendered his resignation from Seagate's board in December.

A bigger problem, though, might be cultural. Hitachi is still run like a more traditional Japanese company. That is, the company is somewhat wary of outsiders, but is likely more willing to trust other Japanese partners. One observer noted that a Japanese conglomerate seems a better fit than other proposals that have floated about. Another observed that even though Silver Lake and Hitachi have translators, they probably still aren't speaking the same language.

The Nikkei Business Daily has reported that Hitachi would likely sell less than 50 percent of its stock to Silver Lake. A minority would prevent Silver Lake from exerting control. For a firm that earns money by repackaging and reselling companies, that's a deal killer.

Either way, "something has got to happen," said one former hard drive executive. Hitachi eliminated a lot of executives in an October shakeup. It has also continued to lose ground against Seagate and Western Digital, two drive companies that currently are profitable.

Hitachi got into drives when it bought IBM's storage division in 2002.

If a deal occurs, it will likely occur by April 1, the beginning of the new business year in Japan.

In December, Hitachi said that it wants to improve its hard drive business, but has not decided to sell it. It has not formally commented since. Toshiba and Fujitsu have yet to return requests for comment.

CNET News.com's Dawn Kawamoto contributed to this report.

Thin is in for Hitachi.

The Japanese conglomerate will unveil a 50-inch plasma TV that measures only 1.5 inches thick at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week.

The prototype TV is less than one-third of the usual thickness of a conventional plasma of this size, which ordinarily clocks in at around 5 inches or more, according to Bill Whalen, director of product development at Hitachi.

It will come to market in 2009, he added, and weigh around half as much as a standard plasma. Typically, a plasma of this girth might weigh 90 pounds, he added.

"It could be a new category in plasma," he said.

TV manufacturers still use the conference to compete over who can come out with the biggest TV. Last year, Sharp bested competitors with a 108-inch LCD TV. This year, Panasonic is expected to unfurl a 150-inch plasma TV.

But thinness and industrial designs are heated battlegrounds too. JVC has a 42-inch LCD coming out this year that measures 22 millimeters thick, while Sharp has a 52-incher that measures only 20 millimeters thick. (Release date is as yet unknown.)

Hitachi, though, seems to be putting the most emphasis on the subject. It has 35-millimeter thick LCD TVs coming out this year and 19-millimeter thick LCDs coming in 2009. (Hitachi, however, adds that these thin TVs technically aren't TVs. They are displays. The TV tuner card is in a separate box. Together, the two make a TV.)

A thin plasma will also help Hitachi. The company has been one of the primary backers of plasma. LCD, however, has outsold it.

Hitachi is wielding a new weapon in the television market. Namely, automotive engineers.

The frame on the 35-millimeter-thick LCD TVs that the Japanese manufacturing giant will showcase at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week is made out of a polycarbonate from the company's automotive division, according to Bill Whalen, director of product development at Hitachi. Because the TV is thinner than most LCD TVs that size, it requires a stronger, more rigid frame, which the polycarbonate made possible.

Most people don't know Hitachi has an automotive company. "But if you have a fuel-injection system in your car, it is probably from Hitachi," Whalen said.

Hitachi automotive engineers and employees in the medical device group pitched in on creating these slim TVs.

(Credit: Hitachi)

As a finishing touch, the TV engineers took the polycarbonate to Hitachi's industrial design group. This group adopted a translucent version of the material and put a silver metallic layer underneath the TV frame to give it an unusual color undertone.

The TV also sports a light diffuser that comes from Hitachi's medical equipment group, a florescent backlight with an external electrode from another division, and a slim power supply specially designed by the conglomerate's component group.

"You can't just go off the shelf and buy a power supply like that," he said.

Hitachi's supercomputing group, meanwhile, contributed its know-how with a program that analyzes and simulates air flow. The program is used to help computer engineers remove heat from the inside of computers. The same principles can, and were, used on the TV.

Technology scavenger hunts like this will play a key role in Hitachi's efforts to expand its worldwide market share in electronics. Although a long-established brand, Hitachi often gets overshadowed by Sony, Philips, and Samsung. (Hitachi is ranked fourth worldwide in plasma, but is not in the top five in the larger LCD market, according to DisplaySearch.)

Approximately two years ago, however, the company reorganized. One of the primary goals of the reorganization was to better exploit the technology and components being made by the different divisions of the company, which pulls in $90 billion a year in revenue.

The 35-millimeter-thick TVs, which will hit the market in 2008 and have screens that measure 35 inches and up, are the first products to come out of this process. Internally, the company seems happy with the results. Designers first came up with the idea of doing a slim TV like this. Upper management approved the idea. The TV engineering group, however, claimed it couldn't be done. The company's executive team told them to shop around a bit and try harder, said Whalen. (Technically speaking, the TV is actually a display because the TV tuner is on the outside, but the effect is the same. You still watch programs on it.)

Next up will be a series of LCD TVs measuring 19 millimeters thick. Prototypes with 32-inch screens, which are expected to hit the market in 2009, were shown off at Ceatec in Japan in October. Slim TVs also weigh less than standard LCDs. Because Hitachi has been one of the primary backers of plasma TVs, these sorts of component and engineering tweaks will likely come to those TVs too.

The company will primarily concentrate on the upper end of the price range in TVs.

"Consumers are looking for lifestyle designs," said Daniel Lee, vice president of marketing for Hitachi America.

Japan Inc. will put on the hard sell at the Consumer Electronics Show next week.

Panasonic is expected to unveil a 150-inch plasma television during a keynote speech Monday by Toshihiro Sakamoto, president of the Panasonic Audio Visual Networks Company. (Matsushita Electric goes by Panasonic in the U.S.) Sakamoto, a new speaker to the CES keynote circuit, is also expected to unveil a number of other products during his speech.

Rival Hitachi, meanwhile, will show off a series of ultraslim LCD TVs that have yet to be exhibited in the U.S. The 32-inch TVs, shown first at Ceatec outside of Tokyo last October, measure 19 millimeters wide. These TVs are expected to come out in 2009. In the meantime, Hitachi plans to release a series of 35-millimeter-wide TVs in 2008. Several Executives from Hitachi, which is making a push to expand market share in the U.S., will also attend the show.

Sharp and JVC, which showed off similar slim LCDs at Ceatec, will likely bring them to CES for a U.S. debut as well. Expect other slim TVs too. And, as usual, Sony will be there with a host of products and execs.

Back in 2004, traditional electronics manufacturers were besieged by competition from PC makers and small companies such as Westinghouse Digital entering their field. "Five or six years ago it was a peaceful marketplace, now people from the outside are coming in like hunting tribes," Hideki "Dick" Komiyama, then president and chief operating officer of Sony Electronics, said in 2004. (Komiyama is now president of Sony Ericsson.)

The onslaught didn't turn out exactly as anticipated. Companies like Westinghouse and Vizio have succeeded, but Dell and Hewlett-Packard have not done as well as expected in electronics. Moreover, members of the old guard like Panasonic and Sharp are still standing and in some respects are becoming more aggressive in terms of pricing and product design.

It's the notebook for neurotics.

Asus, the Taiwanese computer maker, will come out with a notebook that sports two 500GB hard drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. Combined, this will give a fully configured Asus M70 notebook a terabyte of storage.

Put another way, the notebook will be capable of storing 1,000 hours of video, or more than 350 feature length movies, or 250,000 four-minute songs. That will probably tide you over for even the worst airport layovers. A terabyte also holds about the same amount of data that could be stored on the paper from 50,000 trees.

Asus will also release notebooks with a single 500GB drive.

Behold the Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.

(Credit: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies)

Hitachi's Travelstar 5K500 drive, coming in February, is the highest-capacity 2.5-inch drive to date, according to Hitachi. The drive, like most cutting-edge hard drives being made these days, features perpendicular recording, which allows more data per square inch than conventional drives.

Hitachi will also come out with a 400GB version in the first quarter. These drives record data on three platters. The prices on the drives and the notebooks were not revealed.

A related drive, the Travelstar E5K500, is due by the end of the second quarter, also in both 400GB and 500GB versions. The "E" in the model number apparently stands for "enhanced availability"--this drive is intended for lower-transaction environments working round-the-clock, including blade servers, network routers, point-of-sale terminals and video surveillance systems. Clarification: We were initially unclear on the drive that's due in Q2. As noted in this paragraph, it's the E5K500.

A few years ago, a terabyte of storage was an astronomical amount of storage. Sony showed off a home storage device at Ceatec in Japan in 2004 with a . The unit cost about $5,000.

Hard-drive manufacturers, however, have managed to double the amount of storage on their drives about every two years. (During the late 1990s, they were doubling storage capacity annually.) Thus, the astronomical becomes conventional pretty quickly. Desktop terabyte drives with larger 3.5-inch-diameter platters started appearing last year. (Hitachi came out with the first.) These drives sell for around $400.

Analysts and self-employed experts often scoff at the increase in storage, claiming customers won't need more storage. Drive execs, however, note that the public continues to gobble up as many gigabytes as they can shovel out the door. The advent of high-definition video and digital video recorders has been a boon for hard-drive makers.

Some drive makers, notably Seagate Technology and Western Digital, are even making money, which can be rare in this business. (Hitachi, which bought IBM's drive business, often loses money and is looking at ways to sell of its hard drive division.)

Casinos are also big consumers of drives, according to hard-drive execs. What do you think they store all that surveillance video on?

Hitachi's sexy new flat screens.

(Credit: Hitachi Japan)

At a press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, Hitachi unveiled its new "Ultra Thin" LCD TVs, a new line of flat-panel sets that measure only 35 millimeters (1.5 inches) in thickness. While other companies have also announced uberskinny flat-panel TVs recently--some even thinner than Hitachi's--the Ultra Thin (or UT) LCD line is the first to actually hit the market.

"Our focus for the last few years in the flat-panel business has been on the plasma side, but we've been working very diligently on the LCD side," Kevin Sullivan, Hitachi's chief strategy officer and senior vice president of sales, said in a conference call with the U.S. press.

Three models of the Ultra Thin LCD TVs, all with 6-watt speakers built into the base, are being manufactured: the smallest is a 32-inch model with 1366x768-pixel resolution, and two higher-end models (one 37", and one 42") with 1920x1080-pixel resolution.

The televisions will be available in Japan, where the line is known as the "Wooo," starting in mid-December with the 32-inch model. In the United States, the 32-inch model will hit stores in the first quarter of 2008, with the larger TVs coming in the second quarter. The Japanese versions will have a variety of color choices (black, white, and limited-edition blue and red for the 32-inch model) but it does not appear that the color variations will be coming stateside.

Pricing for the U.S. market has not yet been announced, but don't expect anything cheap. With the ultrathin TVs, Hitachi is targeting "a highly affluent consumer," said Daniel Lee, vice president of marketing. "This person or this family is going to seek luxury, prestige (and) style." He added, "Our marketing theme was 'accessible luxury' in '07. We're going to be moving into that 'pure luxury' category in '08."

CHIBA, Japan--Sharp, Hitachi and JVC are taking the bulk out of large LCD televisions.

All three manufacturers are showing off LCD TVs here at Ceatec this week with panels that are less than an inch thick. The TV stand and the electronics add bulk, but the electronics can be put in the base of the stand or in a unit that connects to the TV wirelessly.

Hitachi's groovy slim TVs--a red one and a side view of a white one.

(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)

Hitachi had the thinnest. It showed off a 32-inch TV with a panel that measured only 19 millimeters thick. Sharp showed off a 52-inch TV with a 20-millimeter thick panel. There are 25 millimeters to an inch. A typical thin LCD panel on the market today is a couple of inches thick, according to Hitachi.

JVC's was the thickest of the three at 22 millimeters, but the company also likes to point out that it will be selling its thin LCD TVs this spring. The sets will start at 42 inches and get larger from there. Hitachi won't come out with its TV until 2009. Sharp has been vague about when it might release its thin LCD.

All three manufacturers are fairly vague about how they accomplished their respective feats. Hitachi says it's the light source it's putting in the TV. However, the company won't say what the light source is. JVC is using a fluorescent light source, not LEDs, but it won't get more specific than that.

Everyone is also tweaking the performance of their TVs in other ways. JVC, for instance, showed off a technology for reducing image noise in LCD TVs. Software in the TV creates a 3D simulation of images coming across the TV. It then tweaks the 2D image that will come across the TV to you by data it obtains in the 3D simulation to make a more accurate image.

Hitachi, meanwhile, said it will try to make a lot of news at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. The company wants to move upmarket in TVs by emphasizing, among other factors, industrial design.