HP recently joined the battle for the living room by unveiling a full line of consumer electronics products. Soon you'll see HP branded iPods, plasma TVs and home theatre projectors, to name a few.  

Some devices - and those of competitors Dell, Gateway, Sony, etc., - will include network connections at the outset, others will add them later on. Guess who'll be called upon to integrate all this stuff?  

To help prepare you for the onslaught of questions from friends, family and colleagues, here's a rundown on HP's offerings. Some details are still sketchy, but most products are shipping this fall.   

The HP Digital Entertainment Center combines a personal video recorder, digital video recorder and a DVD player so you can manage music, movies and photos from a single box. An optional personal (removeable) media drive lets you save all the content and take it with you. Pricing, availability and further details were not announced.

The HP Media Center Extender transmits content wirelessly from any Media Center PC or the HP Digital Entertainment Center to any TV in the house. Further details, including specifications, availability and pricing, will be announced later. But our  guess is the Media Center Extender will be a networked-media-player-type box that connects to a TV/stereo to play content from either the Media Center PC, the Digital Entertainment Center, or a regular PC.

New HP TVs include a 42-inch HD-ready Plasma TV (PL4245N, $5,000), a 42-inch Enhanced Definition Plasma TV (PE4240N, $5,000), a 30-inch HD-ready LCD TV (LC3040N, $3,500) and a 26-inch HD-ready LCD TV (LC2640N, $2,500). No sign of Ethernet ports or Wi-Fi interfaces on these yet.

The HP Instant Cinema Digital Projector (ep9010, $2,000) merges a DVD player, portable projector and a 5.1-capable surround-sound system into one device. No network connectivity here, either.

The HP Pavilion dv1000 series Entertainment Notebook PC ($1,099), which includes HP's QuickPlay feature - lets you play your DVDs or listen to a music CD without booting up the computer (take that, Microsoft!).

The first co-branded iPod, the Apple iPod from HP will come in 20G-byte ($299) and 40G-byte models ($399), priced the same as Apple's. So why go with HP? Maybe for the HP Printable Tattoos, ultra thin stickers you apply to the iPod's exterior. Tattoos can be album covers, or art you create yourself using an HP printer. Available album art will be updated at this Web site: www.hp.com/music. 

The HP Photosmart 375 Compact Photo Printer ($199) prints 4-inch by 6-inch photos via the printer's  memory card (no PC necessary) and can become a "mobile photo lab" when you use the HP Internal Battery for Compact Photo Printers. Connect the optional HP bt300 Bluetooth Wireless Printer Adapter to print photos wirelessly from a Bluetooth-enabled camera phone.

The HP Photosmart 2710 All-In-One ($399) can print, copy, scan and fax, with memory card slots and wireless features. This device can also print photos from camera phones and other Bluetooth devices.

The HP Photosmart 8450 Photo Printer ($299) is a network-enabled printer, and has an eight-ink color printing system that can print up to 72 million different color combinations. The printer has a 2.5-inch color display so you can see the photos before you print them.

The HP Photosmart R607 digital camera ($299) is a 4.1 megapixel camera that includes features such as adaptive lighting and in-camera red-eye removal.

With all of these new products, the big question becomes this: Will you trust a computer-based company with your consumer electronics needs? Or do the CE companies (Sony, Toshiba, Philips, etc.) have a leg up? Send me a note at kshaw@nww.com and we'll discuss in a future newsletter.