Ovideon Shows OLED Portable Media Recorder

LAS VEGAS — Ovideon used CES to introduce an ultra-compact portable media recorder (PMR), called AVIAh, that was one of the first A/V products to incorporate an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) color screen.

The tiny handheld PMR will record video, audio and image files and play them back on a 2.48-inch OLED screen.

Ovideon said the PMR is small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, and weighs 4.9 ounces. Multimeda files are stored to a new micro 1-inch hard drive with 5GB capacity. The company plans to introduce additional models later in the year with up to 8GB capacity.

“Just like the 1.8-inch drives that are currently being used by Apple and others, we expect that our smaller 1-inch hard drives will reach similar capacity next year,” said Dan Zubic, Ovideon's principal owner. “We chose the smaller size so we can make our unit as small and as portable as possible.”

The AVIAh PMR will ship this month at a $599 suggested retail price.

Features include a thumb-controlled jog dial, built-in cable-ready NTSC TV tuner with removable antenna, cable input terminals, video in and out terminals for connection to larger TVs, driver and media management software, removable batteries with two Li-ion battery packs, ear buds, and microphone input. A USB interface is included for connection to a PC.

The company opted to use an OLED screen rather than a conventional LCD because the new technology produces brighter images, 16 million colors and offers a very rapid response time. Resolution is listed as 521 by 218 pixels. The technology is said to cut down on image artifacts. Because the electroluminescent display does not require backlighting, it is more power efficient.