The kitchen has been the busiest place in any home for hundreds of years, so it's no wonder that all sorts of more or less useful and more or less crazy gadgets designed particularly for this space have recently hit the shelves. And one such product is Pandigital's Kitchen HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame, which incorporates just about everything around the kitchen (the sink too, with a little tweaking).
The fact that the kitchen is pretty much the only place in one's home visited by all the members of a family is exactly the factor that led to the development of this particular product, according to Dean Finnegan, CEO, Pandigital. "As the hub of today's busy home, the kitchen is now incorporating new technologies that have already been embraced in other areas of the home and office. The Pandigital Kitchen HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame addresses this new demand with the convergence of three key technologies into a single product."
As the pretty self-explanatory name says it, the device is capable of carrying out three different functions. Thus, first of all, it's a HDTV set, which supports 1280x720 HD-ready resolutions, as well as ATSC/NTSC, composite, S-Video, YPbPr and HDMI. Moreover, it also comes pre-loaded with a recipe book in electronic format and also supports the addition of new recipes in its 512 MB internal memory.
Last but not least, it can also be used for displaying digital photos, either from its own internal memory or via a card reader, compatible with SD, XD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro/Memory Stick Duo, Compact Flash and MultiMedia cards or by a connection to Google's Picasa photo sharing website. However, beside JPEG files, Pandigital's kitchen frame also supports Motion JPEG, MPEG 1, MPEG 4 and AVI files, which means that it can also be used for video playback, at least to some extent.
Since, after all, we're dealing with a device designed especially for the kitchen, Pandigital's "uber-frame" sports a mess-proof design that is sealed with glass, so it is protected from water, oil, flour and other common ingredients, as well as from spills and splatters. Moreover, the device comes with a countertop stand and an under-cabinet mount, and is also wall-mountable, so customers can position it where they'll need it most, while the interchangeable faceplates in brushed stainless, black and white let users match their kitchen's décor.
As the company informs us, the Kitchen HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame will be available starting June at a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $399.99, which means that all the gadget-crazy housewives (or house-husbands) should start saving right now if they want to have one of these contraptions installed in their hi-tech kitchens.
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