Head units and touch-screen panels worth considering

There are plenty of hi-tech car gadgets on the market this year, and as far as I can see, only a few of them are worthy candidates for your consideration. Two of them come from the leading brands Sony and Pioneer.

Published on January 30, 2008

Head units and touch-screen panels worth considering

Sony's digital still cameras, camcorders and liquid-crystal-display (LCD) television sets seem to be gaining greater and greater popularity. Sony also holds a thick slice of the car-audio market, and one of its popular car gadgets is the XAV-W1, its first in-dash audio-visual media player. It looks set to raise the standards in the after-sales car-technology segment.

Serving as a multimedia centre, the XAV-W1's touch screen features a zone-by-zone function to divide the listening area into the front and back seats, just like the multi-zone functions in a home audio gadget.

The system's 6.95-inch, WVGA TFT Active Matrix display is one of the brightest, clearest, best-rendered touch screens we have ever seen on any in-car video display. It has image resolution of 800 pixels x 480 pixels. When it comes in a set, the screen display has a contrast ratio of 520:1 with wireless card RM-X160.

It also comes with an in-dash receiver with a humongous 52W x 4-channel power, driven by S-Mosfet amplification.

In addition to its superb visual reproduction and well-designed menu structures, the XAV-W1 supports a large number of media sources as standard and has a good range of expandability options such as a microphone input jack for karaoke function.

Pioneer's AVH-P5950 DVD receiver has an anti-glare 7-inch LCD screen with touch-screen panel operation. The DVD receiver comes with an internal Dolby Digital decoder and stereo pulse-code modulation along with a 96/24bit digital-to-analogue converter for superior audio reproduction. It is also compatible with multimedia files such as MP3, WMA/AAC and DivX and has USB connectivity. The unit can also connect to iPod, via iPod's direct-control function.

Noticeably, Japanese brands are predominant in the after-sales car head-unit segment, whereas European and US brands come with amplifiers and loudspeakers. The main reason seems to be that Japanese manufacturers are better at meeting customers' demands. Also many hi-tech car gadgets are now turning to the multimedia market.

By Wijit Boonchoo