Hewlett-Packard has announced two new desktop PCs ahead of CES 2012 – where they'd likely be drowned in a sea of Ultrabook announcements. One of them is the Omni 27 all-in-one system, the company's first all-in-one model with a massive 27-inch 1080p LED-backlit display. It rocks the same Easel design as HP's TouchSmart all-in-one PCs, with edge-to-edge glass on the screen, but there's no touchscreen here.
Starting at $1,200 for the base system, the Omni 27 includes a 2.5GHz Sandy Bridge Core i5-2400S processor, integrated graphics, 6GB of RAM, Beats Audio, and two USB 3.0 ports. While it comes with a DVD drive, you can get a Blu-ray player as an option, as well as a TV tuner and HDMI input.
HP's also making the Omni the first non-touch PC with its Magic Canvas software – the UI formerly known as TouchSmart that has since been re-tooled to work with non-touch machines. The machine will be taking on Apple's 27-inch iMac, which starts at $1,700, in the U.S. from January 8.
The second desktop PC being announced today is the Pavilion Phoenix h9, a "prosumer" system billed by HP as their most powerful Pavilion PC to date. The base model includes an eight-core AMD FX-8100 processor, 8GB of RAM, a 160GB SSD, and a Radeon 7670 GPU with 1GB of VRAM for $1,150. There are also options for Intel's enthusiast-grade X79 processors, Nvidia graphics, secondary hard drives and liquid cooling.
Rounding out today's announcements HP also unveiled three new business-focused monitors: the 23-inch Compaq L2311c with a built-in port replicator, priced at $319, along the more affordable LED-backlit LV1911 and LV2011 monitors which should set you back $125 and $135 respectively.