What's New!

Tomorrow I'm off to our 2006 Home Entertainment Show at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport—LAX to the locals. We'll be blogging on line from the show, including gobs of photos and comments about all the new products we see. Check it out, starting tomorrow evening, Thursday, June 1.

On another subject, if you've been logging onto this site lately (and if you haven't, how are you reading this!) you've seen some significant changes. The most dramatic of these is the addition of our new Buyer's Guides.

The Buyer's Guides will replace and greatly expand on the sort of information we provided with our former Platinum and Gold lists. They will include information on a wide range of products, including our new Ultimate and Premier selections—the choicest of the choice from the products we've tested hands-on.

There will also be information in the Guides on many other products as well. Some of these entries will be product release information only, and some will be based on the personal observations of our contributors. The latter two categories (which will be clearly distinguished in the listings) will not be reviews per se, since they won't be hands-on tests under our own familiar and controlled test conditions. Such products won't be eligible for inclusion in our Ultimate, Premier, and Budget categories without a hands-on review, but are products you will want to know more about.

Check out the Buyer's Guides. Navigate around in them to get familiar with how they work and what sort of information they provide, including both summaries and links to the full reviews, where available. The first of these Guides include Speakers, Video Projectors, Flat Panel Displays, and AV Receivers. Other categories will be added soon.

To create and maintain these Buyer's Guides we had to redirect some resources, which is why you now see two fewer blogs on the site than before. But rest assured, Michael Fremer and Joel Brinkley are still very much on board. You will be reading more insightful product reviews from them in future weeks. And they are always welcome to post a guest entry on this blog any time the inspiration strikes them.

Also coming soon is another new section, The Movie Room. It will include reviews of a wide range of new DVDs, with a major emphasis on new HD DVDs and Blu-ray releases. Watch for it.

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