Hitachi Software Engineering Co Ltd announced a new product in its "StarBoard" series of electronic blackboards, intending to expand the sales to the education market.
The company changed the functions of the "PX-DUO-50" electronic blackboard and will release it Aug 17, 2008. The new product is intended for the "School New Deal program," which Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology proposed to enhance ICT (information and communication technology) and quake resistance of schools.
The ministry is planning to set up an electronic blackboard priced at about ¥700,000 in each of the elementary and junior high schools in Japan. And Hitachi Software is aiming at shipping its product to half of them.
The PX-DUO-50 features a 50-inch PDP. Equipped with an embedded PC and a coordinate detection device using two infrared cameras, it supports character input and character recognition. And the new product comes with a terrestrial digital TV tuner and a movable stand.
The control buttons, which are positioned on the left side of the display in the previous product, are mounted on the right side in the new product in consideration of the opinions of teachers. In addition, a protective cover is available as an option.
In addition to the electronic blackboard, Hitachi Software announced a coordinate detection device, "Universal Digitizer Kit (UDK)," which employs a lens with a field angle of 170° for its infrared camera. Because the distance between the two cameras can be narrowed, the coordinate detection device can be equipped regardless of the screen size.
For the coordinate detection device of the previous product, an infrared camera with a field angle of 94° is mounted on each of the upper right and upper left parts of the display. Therefore, the size of the coordinate detection device has to be changed depending on the screen size.
Hitachi Software will release the "StarBoard Next-FX-DUO" (tentative name), a projector-type electronic blackboard equipped with the UDK, in the second half of fiscal 2009. Furthermore, it plans to launch the "After-purchase StarBoard," an external unit for digital TVs, in fiscal 2010.
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