New gadgets offer high-tech entertainment

April 24, 2000
Web posted at: 3:48 PM EDT (1948 GMT)

By Technology Correspondent Rick Lockridge

(CNN) -- Want to find the ultimate computer monitor? Looking for interactive movies online? How about a super jukebox to preserve a music collection that ranges from phonographs to MP3 files?

The ultimate desktop status symbol is the Apple Cinema Display. The computer monitor is thinner than a briefcase and boasts the first all-digital display, built to work only with the new line of Macintosh G4 computers.

"There's no conversion from analog. It keeps the signal pure digital, start to finish, which gives you a beautiful picture, beautiful color and a beautiful contrast ratio of 300-to-1," explains Greg Joswiak of Apple Computer.

Work might be hard to accomplish with the $4,000 monitor, which offers an impressive screen for DVD movies.

Speaking of which, if you ever wanted to roar through the streets of Manhattan without taking your life in your hands, or hover over Hawaii in a helicopter without leaving your armchair, Ipix.com is a Web site to watch.

Ipix, which pioneered the art of interactive, 360-degree-view still photography, has moved into moving pictures.

Slow Internet connections pose a problem for home users, but the company said directors Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard have agreed to use the technology to make movies where each viewer can steer the plot in a different direction.

For music lovers, the Nomad Jukebox by Creative Labs looks like a portable CD player, but is actually a digital music machine. Its 6-gigabyte hard drive can hold more than a hundred hours worth of MP3 music files downloaded from your PC.

"We did have a lot of demand from people saying, 'You know what, I have a ton of music at home that I have been collecting since I was a kid.' Some if it was on tape, vinyl, CDs, and this is our solution for people to carry it with them wherever they go," Christi Wilkerson of Creative Labs said.

Expect to pay about $500 for the Nomad when it wanders into stores this summer.

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Internet Pictures Corporation
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