AUDIO VIDEO NEWS

Digital technology is changing everything—especially the marketing of entertainment. DVD-Audio has the music industry excited about interactive features like artists' bios, still pictures, and other as-yet unimagined marketing opportunities. Free MP3 audio files are being used by some music companies as promotional tools for new releases.

Just imagine if you could have this for your home theater system: <A HREF="www.ibm.com">IBM</A> announced last week the T220, which the company is calling the world's highest-resolution flat panel monitor. Unfortunately for us, IBM says that the new display will enable "photograph-quality" imaging for science, banking, engineering, publishing, medicine, and business-critical visualization tasks, and is not likely to appear in consumer living rooms anytime soon.

The only single-screen movie theater left in the state of Louisiana is upgrading - in a major way. The historic Prytania Theater has just upgraded to 4K digital cinema. The Prytania is the oldest operating theater in the city, having opened in...

Many home theater enthusiasts grumble about the slow pace of the development of digital television without considering the cost of the transition for broadcasters&mdash;approximately $2 million per studio. The great change isn't occurring only in our viewing rooms, but also in studios throughout North America.

Philips got out of the US TV market, but Philips-branded Blu-ray players, marketed under the Funai banner will be hitting shelves soon, along with a Magnavox-branded LCD/Blu-ray combo unit.Three new units will be available: the $299 BDP-3010, the...

This fall, Pioneer Electronics USA will roll out two new high-definition plasma displays with all digital signal paths and video performance capable of "billions" of colors.

For home theater fans, plasma display panels (PDPs) are among the most promising technologies. The space-saving flat panels eliminate the need for projectors and screens or huge boxy rear projection sets, but their acceptance by critical viewers has been hampered by a low (400:1) contrast ratio which renders black as more like charcoal gray.