Let’s all give a round of applause for Hitachi. Hitachi, with an announcement earlier today, has beaten the likes of Samsung and LG to the title of the world’s first “ultrathin”, production-ready LCD TV. Earlier today, they unveiled the Wooo UT (ultrathin) series of LCDs at the CEATEC convention in Japan, showing off it’s slim 35mm profile. While we here at PaulTech have shown you plenty of tiny televisions, Hitachi is the first to have LCDs this close to rolling off the production line. On top of being first to market, the Wooo UT series of television sets have some other, novel features in their lineup. A wireless-capable media station, a portable, removable video storage drive, and 4 different colors. It’s not too often that you can buy a red or blue LCD television (quantities are limited).

The iVDR-S functionality is probably the 2nd coolest part (right behind the 35mm profile) of Hitachi’s new TV line. By cramming DVR features into your TV, those who don’t have one as part of their television package have access to one embedded into the UT series TVs. In order to take advantage of this feature, however, the media station box should be included in the installation.

Of course, there’s more than just iVDR-S that makes the media station attractive. By adding more HDMI ports, LAN connections, removable media interfaces, and the room for a UWB expansion, there’s plenty of reason to use that media station. While stopping short of being a Media Center PC, it has enough redeeming value to be included.

Specs for the planned roll out of these TVs in North America are unavailable at this time, but Hitachi has a table detailing the production plan for the release in Japan. You can see it here below. The prices for the TVs will range from ¥430,000 to ¥230,000 (around $3,800 to $2,000 for North America).

That’s all we have at the time. You can see a couple of images of the Wooo series in pre-release detail and a photograph from the actual CEATEC expo here below.

Pictures courtesy of: Hitachi Global;

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