If you thought whizzing around on Google Maps on your Apple iPad was impressive, you should see the enormous LG mutlitouch screens at CES in Las Vegas.

The LG Pen Touch Multi Board is three plasma screens wedged together to create one enormous multitouch surface. As the name suggests, the screen doesn’t recognise swipes of the finger; this beast is controlled using pressure-sensitive styluses. However, it can still pull off all the regular mutlitouch tricks, such as zooming in by performing a pinching motion with a stylus in each hand, as you can see demonstrated in the photo below.

This type of technology is intended for the classroom rather than the living room. At one point, three people were simultaneously drawing on the screen using a Paint-style application, giving an indication of the kind of applications that it could be used for in schools.

However, we suspect headteachers might have to sacrifice a teacher or two to afford this magnificent machine.

For a while now I’ve been blathering on to anyone who’ll listen (and plenty who’d rather not – Ed) about falling TFT prices, while marvelling at the bargains that can currently be had. Large-format TFTs have gone from expensive luxuries to affordable commodities in a remarkably short period of time, so I wasn’t surprised to read today that the head of LG Display, Kwon Young-soo Kwon, believes the industry has “hit the bottom.”

I’ve just finished writing a TFTs Labs for next month’s issue so I know first-hand just how crazy the market has become. We had one 22in TFT for £80 plus VAT, a 24in model for £140 plus VAT and even a monstrous 28in for a little over £200 plus VAT. If I remember correctly, some of these prices are cheaper than 17in and 19in TFTs reviewed just months previously.

It can’t be healthy for a whole industry to plummet so quickly in order to chase declining sales, and the remarks from Kwon at LG back this up. He sees displays for mobile devices as the next major revenue stream to come to the rescue, but the problem for the desktop TFT is where it can go from here. In the past the cheap, smaller TFTs have held the majority of the market share, but there has always been the lure of the larger models – the 22in and 24in ‘giants’ that came at a hefty premium – to keep margins up and to excite us about the future.

In today’s market those very TFTs have become the mainstream, but there’s no longer the same higher segment to look forward to. Would a 30in TFT fit on most home desks? I know my reason for not wanting one is not that it’s too dear, it’s that it simply isn’t practical in my home, and I’m sure many would agree. Even a 28in TFT swamps the average work desk, and I’d argue buying two smaller – and cheaper – screens is infinitely more practical for daily use.

Maybe branching out into other niche markets could bring some relief. Nvidia has decided 2009 will be the year of the 3D monitor (as a preview on our newest sister site BitTech.net demonstrates), which is certainly an area of premium prices right now; Samsung and ViewSonic are on board already, others will inevitably follow.

Touchscreen technology has also been slowly growing, and will certainly come into focus more now Windows 7 is out in the wild. And then there’s the bright light in the distance that is OLED, a technology with astonishing potential but precious little chance of hitting consumer desktops in any helpful timeframe.

Which leaves the industry in a muddle: the large money-spinners have turned into the cheap mainstream fodder, and there are fewer and fewer premium products to take their place. Prestige brands like Sony opted out long ago, and you can count on one hand those remaining, such as Samsung, with the quality to continue to keep both their prices and their sales figures high.

In one sense it’s great news for consumers, as a generic but perfectly usable 22in TFT for £80 should mean everyone can afford to extend their desktop. But the worry is that if we all get too used to cheap and cheerful TFT prices, it’s not too hard to imagine the likes of Samsung, LG et al packing their boxes and joining Sony on the outside looking in – and with that quality gone we’d all be worse off.

The monstrous NEC MultiSync LCD3090WQXi was set up in the Labs for all of eight seconds before a drooling crowd had gathered to marvel at its stunning colour reproduction and ginormous 30in, 2,560 x 1,600 H-IPS panel. Yes, it’s a £1,400 investment, but if you compare it to the main professional-level competition we reckon it actually looks like quite a bargain.

Continuing the professional theme was the Epson Stylus Photo R2880, the flagship of its A3 range. Remarkably quiet in use, extremely simple to use and maintain, and using not one but three separate black inks (surely Light Light Black is just Grey?) it’s a photographer’s dream. Even at £357 plus VAT it’s a quality investment for any semi-pro.

PCs and laptops

The Panasonic Toughbook CF-F8 arrived for a preview, departing from its predecessors in that it boasts a widescreen-aspect display. Sasha gave it a battering and determined that it’s the perfect choice “for the serious business traveler who values reliability and longevity above all else”.

Mesh’s latest budget PC, the Titan GT Pro, packed a surprising punch – it scored 1.82 in our benchmarks despite costing just £575 – and was only let down by a fairly old graphics card and a mediocre monitor. Still, Mike reckoned it’s one to look out for if you’re “looking for a desktop system on a stringent budget”.

The netbook swarm continued, with the uninspiring Fujitsu Siemens AMILO Mini Ui 3520 being easily overshadowed by the bright pink LG X110. Our esteemed editor took one look at the garish colour, tucked it under his arm and jealously guarded it for the next few days. He reckons “if you want to buy a 10in netbook on contract it’s currently the best choice”; we can’t argue – he won’t let us touch it.

Best of the rest

Home servers are yet to really catch on, but a select few manufacturers are trying their best. The Tranquil PC SQA-5H Home Server is the first we’ve seen to really concentrate on design, with an Apple-white finish and sensible dimensions. Darien reckons it’s not cheap, but it’s a fine example of the technology for enthusiasts – whether it’ll grab those all-important non-enthusiasts remains to be seen.

Elsewhere, we looked at the Creative HS-1200 headphones, Darien got his nose into Bruce Schneier’s self-titled …on Security tome, while the business team tested the Lantronix SecureLinx Spider IP device and the Axis P3301 IP camera.

Of course, some conveniently shorten into a series of letters that can actually be said as a single, new word. Think acronyms like NASA, SCUBA, laser. Think VAIO.

Today I read of Sony’s redefinition of the famous VAIO brand, and it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea what it had stood for since its creation.

Very Attractive If Overpriced, perhaps?

The truth, it turns out, is not as exciting as I’d hoped. The original Video Audio Integrated Operation will now become the vastly more descriptive and creative Visual Audio Intelligent Organiser. The laptop world can exhale again.

But Sony isn’t the only brand with a famous abbreviation; a fairly obvious one is the use of HTML in the name of HoTMaiL. There are plenty of other IT brands with abbreviated product or company names – and they range from the interesting to the truly cringe-worthy. How many of these did you know?

Starting off gently with places…

Lexmark, a spin-off from IBM’s printer-manufacturing division, was so named after its base in Lexington, Kentucky. Kyocera is abbreviated from the original Kyoto Ceramics Co, while CISCO isn’t actually an acronym, despite appearances – it’s short for San Francisco.

Onto merging company names…

The two companies Shibaura Seisakusho and Tokyo Denki merged in 1939 to form Tokyo Shibaura Denki, nicknamed Toshiba. It took nearly 40 years for the now-famous name to be made offical.

LG, thankfully, comes from the merger of two Korean companies, Lucky and Goldstar. Far less saccharine than the oft-used “Life’s Good”.

Word meanings…

Samsung comes from the Korean word meaning “three stars”, while Sony itself is derived from Sonus, the Greek goddess of sound. Asus is another abbreviation, and fairly obvious once you know it; it comes from Pegasus, the mythical winged horse.

Finally, the Greek root xer means “dry”, so inventor Chester Carlson used it to distinguish his dry copying device from the wet copying devices of the time; thus Xerox was born.

Place names, merging companies, ancient words and mythical characters. But, much like VAIO once you know what it actually stands for, some acronyms sound exotic but are just plain bad.

Can BenQ really stand for Bringing Enjoyment and Quality to Life?

LG’s newest 22in TFT, the W2252TE, is a case in point. Heralded in its press release as “the world’s most energy efficient monitor”, it claims to offer “a 45% reduction (40W) in power consumption, leading the way in environmentally friendly computer screens”.

Inevitably, the question arises: a 45% reduction over what? No comparison is offered, no rival energy-efficient monitor or even the name of a standard monitor against which the LG may have been tested. The 45% reduction could be over the most power-hungry monitor in the world for all we know. And what does that 40W figure in parentheses represent? The power consumption of this monitor? Of the comparison monitor? Or is 40W the reduction itself?

Scrolling to the specs buried right at the bottom of the release we learn that the power consumption of the W2252TE is in fact 22W – surely a more headline-grabbing figure than the “45% energy reduction” that again follows it. So we know the 40W figure must be the monitor to which LG is comparing the W2252TE, but again we’re given no clue as to what monitor this could be. Another LG monitor? A rival manufacturer? Same size or larger? The figures are meaningless without this information.

It’s nothing new to us. Graphics card manufacturers are constantly slapping “world’s fastest” labels onto their latest creations based on individual game benchmarks, while Intel and AMD can both boast the fastest CPUs depending on what applications and tests you quote. And the fact that very few consmuers have the means, or indeed the desire, to test any of these claims for themselves just makes it easier for the big companies to prove anything they like with “facts”.

Taken on good faith the claims about LG’s W2252TE make for good reading, and the company should be applauded for investing in making its products greener. But if manufacturers want their advances to receive the recognition they deserve, a little more information would go an awful long way.