LG unveils combination MP3 player/digital camera

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LG Electronics' Digital Music Eye is a combination digital camera and MP3 player

by Martyn Williams

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (IDG) -- LG Electronics Inc. announced Monday at Comdex a new product that will lighten the load on your pockets. The South Korean company has combined an MP3 player and digital still camera into a single package.

The Digital Music Eye comes with just 2M bytes of built-in memory -- barely enough to store any digital music but sufficient for 30 images in VGA quality, which is the highest quality the camera is capable of offering.

When it comes to music, users can use a removable MultiMediaCard (MMC) to store their favorite songs. LG says a 32M-byte MMC card provides enough space to store up to 16 songs, depending on the level of compression and quality used.

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The camera, which measures 64.5 x 93.5 x 23 millimeters, can also be connected to a personal computer via a USB (Univeral Serial Bus) port and used as a video camera for desktop video conferencing. In VGA mode the camera is capable of capturing 15 frames per second and higher speed video, at 30 frames per second, is possible at 320 x 240 pixel resolution.

LG plans to sell the camera in five different colors including orange and blue.

The product is the latest in a line of products to combine various functions into a single device. Most notably, many examples have involved integrating additional functions into cellular telephones because they are routinely carried everywhere already. Several telephones that include either MP3 players or digital still cameras are already on the market.

Separately, LG also announced two new MP3 players that it expects to launch in North America in the second quarter of 2001. Both players support the commonly used MP3 format and the WMA and AAC digital music formats. The main difference between the two products is their size and the memory card format supported.

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The MF-PD360 is the slightly more compact of the two new products, at 71 x 76 x 15 millimeters, and supports MMC memory cards, while the MF-PD370, which measures 66.5 x 85 x 19 millimeters, supports the Secure Digital (SD) memory card format. SD is a format developed by SanDisk Corp., Toshiba Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. which integrates copy protection into the card.

The cameras come bundled with their 32M-byte memory cards in the respective formats, and dual memory card slots mean that maximum capacity can be expanded to 128M bytes. The MF-PD360 will run for 12 hours on two AAA batteries while the MF-PD370 will run on a single AA cell. Battery life for the latter player was not provided by LG.

The MF-PD360 has an estimated retail price of $220 while the MF-PD370 is expected to retail for between $249 and $299.

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LG Electronics
Comdex Fall 2000

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