A demonstration of digital television broadcasting in New York City last week may have laid to rest fears about the viability of the Advanced Television Standards Committee's transmission technology. The technique, known as 8-VSB, has been under attack from some quarters, particularly Sinclair Broadcasting, as being inadequate to prevent severe multipath distortion, which results from reflected signals arriving at a receiver slightly later than direct signals. In digital TV, multipath can cause a screen to go blank.

The video-display war got a lot hotter on December 3. That day, <A HREF="http://www.sharp-usa.com/">Sharp Electronics</A> debuted its SharpVision LC-R60HDU CG-Silicon rear projector, the first such display to incorporate the company's revolutionary continuous-grain silicon (CG-Silicon) LCD technology. The 60"-diagonal display has more than 3.93 million pixels, and is said to offer unprecedented brightness, clarity, and color accuracy from any viewing angle. Perfection doesn't come cheap, however. The new projector costs a cool $50k.

The popularity of DVD and home theater is driving sales of big-screen television sets to new heights&mdash;despite the fact that the rollout of digital television may make them obsolete in the near future. Sales of big-screen sets are up 13% over 1998, according to the latest statistics from the <A HREF="http://www.cemacity.org/">Consumer Electronics Association</A>. Ninety percent of the approximately 1 million units sold in 1990 were equipped to display only NTSC analog signals&mdash;or "legacy video," as industry insiders call it.

Last week, we announced the <A HREF="http://www.guidetohometheater.com/shownews.cgi?583">stats on DVD players</A>, which have proven to be one of the hottest format launches in consumer-electronics history. This week, we follow up with recent numbers on DVD software. The results show that, four weeks before the all-important Christmas holiday shopping season, shoppers spiked DVD software sales as they snapped up movies and music videos over the Thanksgiving weekend.