Acer SA has entered the local television market with a range of LCD flat-panel televisions.
At the launch in Johannesburg this week, the company introduced a range of products that observe mainstream screen sizes, such as 26- and 32-inch displays.
"This does not, however, mean that Acer is going into the consumer market but rather moving toward making up the building blocks of a home with technology that connects to a PC," says David Drummond, MD of Acer SA.
"Acer is moving into the LCD TV market as part of its strategy to deliver products for the digital home, where consumer electronics and PCs are starting to converge," adds Mark Prosser, product manager for convergence products at Acer SA.
"It makes sense for us to offer LCD TVs in addition to the other products we already offer for the digital home," he says.
The LCD TV range will be complemented by a range of Media Gateway (MGW) devices, which allows for access to other consumer electronics devices, seamlessly, through one, multi-directional gateway.
The LCD TV market is showing strong growth with projections that more than six million units will be shipped in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in 2005, and a further growth of 20 million units in EMEA is expected by 2008, Prosser notes. It is a market that is reaching an inflection point as customers move away from analogue CRT television sets and embrace LCD TV, he says.
The MGW devices, which will be available independently of the Acer LCD TVs, allow for playback of PC and Internet media via the LCD TV and connected HiFi devices. The devices also allow PCs to connect to satellite and other traditional formats like DVD and CD, providing convergence of consumer electronics and PCs, says Prosser.
The vendor also presented its media centre PC, the Acer Aspire L250 and two models aimed at home users: the Aspire E500 and Aspire SA80. Aspire L250 users will be able to download and listen to music, burn and play DVDs, record TV shows and organise digital photos.
"This system combines the AMD Athlon 64-bit processor and Windows XP Media Centre Edition," says John Geypen, Acer desktop and server product manager at Acer SA.
The internal hard drive sports 250GB of storage. Connection to the Internet is made possible through the integrated 10/100Mbps port or wireless 11b/g network connection, says Geypen.
Support for the new products will be available under a one-year warranty with extended warranty packages being offered after the products hit retail stores, says product manager of Acer EMEA, Shashank Sharma.
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