OCT 6th, 2002

The Samsung SyncMaster 152T that I bought in June has seen a few more price drops. It is now down to 49,800 Yen. I considered getting another, but instead bought the SyncMaster 171Np and am glad that I did. I think it was a smart move. It came out in September and I waited to see it in the stores, but it never appeared, so I bought it from Samsung Direct sight unseen. The price had dropped from 66,800 to 64,800 already. It pivots into portrait mode and that is ideal for viewing web pages and PDFs. The bezel is an incredibly small 14mm, making it ideal for a multi-monitor setup.

I like it so much that I am considering getting another as soon as there is another price drop. That should only be a few weeks. I am pretty sure that I won't be buying another 15" LCD. One issue with these things is that as you almost always will run it at the maximum supported resolution, you need to make sure that the dot-pitch doesn't make the fonts too small on the applications that you use. I gathered some specs:

0.264mm = 17" SXGA (1,280 x 1,024)
0.270mm = 21.3" UXGA (1,600 x 1,200)
0.270mm = 24.06" WUXGA (1,920 x 1,200)
0.281mm = 18" SXGA (1,280 x 1,024)
0.294mm = 19" SXGA (1,280 x 1,024)
0.297mm = 15" XGA (1,024 x 768)
0.2385mm = 15.4" SXGA (1,280 x 1,024) [way to small...]

A 19" SXGA model would get me back up to the dot-pitch of a 15" XGA model, but anything larger than 17" is priced at a premium, so it may be a while before I get anything larger than 17". Who knows, though. The SyncMaster 181T has dropped in price from 130,000 to to below 100,000 Yen in about a month.

Bic sells this model and if you have one of their point cards, it brings the price down to around 90,000 Yen as you'll get 10% back in points that can be used on your next purchase. This model also pivots. When the price drops again I might just go for it instead of a 17" model. I will consider other brands, but Samsung certainly seems leading the way when it comes to pricing.

I also recently bought the vertical Ergotron DeskStand 100 that I mentioned below. I will set it up with two monitors after I move later this month. Dell has a white paper on multimonitor setups. I believe that 2-3 monitors will be the norm for busy people in a few years. Like this guy, I feel crippled when I go to the office and use one.

JUL 27th, 2002

I haven't updated this site on recently! Discovering the WayBackMachine at Archive.org kind of made me think about posting at all. Anyway, here is an archive of this site whether I like it or not.

Those big (256MB & 512MB) SD cards are very easy to find now in Japan and I think they are pretty cheap. Besides Panasonic, Hagiwara SYS-COM, I-O Data and Buffalo also have them. I bought a 256MB Panasonic card a few months ago for about 24,000 Yen at Bic Camera, but they can be found for under 20,000 Yen now. And still no sign of those 256MB Memory Sticks. Poor Sony!

Besides flash memory, another trend I have been following is TFT LCD monitors. Prices seemed to bottom out at the end of last year when you could find a few 15" models, but not very great ones, for around 40,000 Yen. As the analysts predicted -- or maybe because of the analyst's predictions -- prices started rising and kept doing so until June of this year.

Then in June I noticed that Samsung Japan dropped the price of a nice15" model, the 152T, from 66,800 Yen to 59,000 Yen. I bought one a few days later. Most models Samsung only sells direct, but Bic Camera also carries this one, so I got another 10% off/back in points.

A few days ago I got an email from someone that is about to buy a new monitor and I decided to stop by the Samsung site. To my surprise, I found they had dropped the price of this same model not once, but twice, since I had bought mine. So in about 6 weeks the price went from 66,800 Yen to 52,800 Yen. I am using WebSite-Watcher to watch the Samsung Japan news page for changes. I just might pick up another...
 

This leads me to something that is really exciting and that is multi-monitor setups. I have had at least two on my desk at home for the past 3 years. Seems like a no-brainer to me for anyone that is sitting in front of a computer most of the day... and night. Early this year I started looking at products that take 2, 3 or even 4 LCD monitors and get them up onto one stand. Ergotron has some nice stuff and I was happy to see that the ones that I like, the DeskStand 100 series, are available here in Japan at one of my favorite shops, Plat'home. Unfortunately, these things aren't cheap to begin with, costing $265 in the US, and are 49,800 Yen here... That's over $400. Ouch!

The reason I like this vertical model is that I am buying different sized monitors at different times. I think that horizontally placed two different monitors would looks awkward. And I will probably keep a bigger one in the center and would use the vertical stand off to the left/right side of that. I think Ergotron, and companies like it, will do well in Japan and other places where space is at a premium.

When buying LCD monitors besides looking at the usual price, brightness, contrast, response time, etc. there are two things you want to keep in mind that will make mounting easier/nicer later on when you do it. First, make sure that any monitor you buy supports this VESA FPMPMI standard. Second, it makes sense to have the bezel -- that part of the LCD monitor that you see that isn't pixels -- as small as possible.

And a tip: Don't throw away any old PCI video cards with those old computers as they come in handy when you want to add a 2nd or 3rd monitor. I had a few Matrox Millenium I/II 4/8MB cards that came in very handy when I started adding my 2nd and 3rd monitors. I still have them. Right now I have two dualhead Matrox cards in my main machine.

I searched the Net for 'multi-monitor' and checked out some of the setups. Here is a site that has a lot of photos and information. Check out the gallery. Pretty neat site. It's pretty funny to see that many of those photos have so many CRTs lined up. I am in the process of finding someone to take my 21" CRT out the door. I will never look back. It was nice, but I still have the box that it came in and I estimate that 5-6 of my 15" LCD Samsung boxes can fit into that box. Anyone outside of Japan has to realize that space it really tight here.

Last summer I bought my 3rd MP3 player, the NEXII, by a company in Hong Kong called Frontier Labs. I bought a 2nd one for a Xmas present when I was in NYC. Since then I have bought a 4th & 5th MP3 players, but I find that I prefer the NEXII to the others. I should have written about this thing a lot sooner. It just works. Compact Flash type II slot and all it takes to get your stuff to play is just drag and drop the songs I want to take with me to my CF card

My 4th MP3 player is this:

And this is my 4th:

MAR 10th, 2002

Finally found a place that has the Panasonic 256MB and 512MB SD memory cards  in stock. Sofmap.com has them for 23,799 and 44,799 Yen. I won't be buying one for a while, but it is nice to know they exist. Neither of these sizes as appeared yet on Kakaku.com, a Japanese price comparison site. Akabaoo, Store number 3 in Akihabara,  where I usually buy flash memory cards, is probably where I will end up buying any new ones.

Here is a Japanese BBS where some people are following the supply and prices of these cards that were supposed to be out in January.

I did pick up a 128MB Toshiba SD card for around 11,000 Yen last month when I bought the new Minolta DiMAGE X camera.

My Handera 330 has a SD/MMC slot and I use it for backing up to a 64MMC card a few times a week. I did some simple testing and backing up about 6MB to the 128MB SD card was twice as fast as it was to the MMC card. I think I will be getting either another SD card soon for this purpose.

JAN 19th, 2002
 

Panasonic's 512MB SD (Secure Digital) Memory card should go on sale this Monday.  I probably won't be buying any SD in this size for a while, but I think this really is the beginning of the end of the war of this round of small removable flash memory wars... The winners are SD/MMC and CompactFlash, with the losers being Memory Stick and SmartMedia....

JAN 11th, 2002

Not much new. At least nothing worth mentioning here. Maybe later...