The Big Picture

First, I'd like to thank all of you who responded to my query of last week. I got more than 30 replies that expressed a wide range of opinions on what products <I>UAV</I> should review&mdash;not only specific products, but types of products, price ranges, and other criteria. Here's a summary and a follow-up question...

My wife Joanna was on a business trip last week, and she found herself in a hotel room with an LCD TV. As she was doing her daily stretching routine on the floor, she turned on the TV and noticed that the colors looked very weird from that angle, "almost like a color negative" as she wrote in an e-mail. "What's up with that?" she wondered.

DVRs (digital video recorders) give advertisers and broadcasters fits. These wondrous devices allow viewers to quickly skip over commercials, compressing an hour-long show to under 50 minutes and avoiding all those annoying ads. But wait&#151;those ads are what pay for the program itself, so if few people watched them, they'd lose their value, and the programs would dwindle and finally disappear.

My blog is a bit later than usual this week, but I've been pretty busy. Tom Norton and I are taking the newly developed video-technician training course offered by THX at the company's headquarters in San Rafael, California, just north of San Francisco in Marin County. Tuesday was the first of three full days of instruction and hands-on lab work, after which some of us went out to dinner and caught Hugh Masekela's set at Yoshi's, a famous jazz spot in Oakland. After a wrong turn by Laurie Fincham, THX's brilliant but directionally challenged chief scientist&#151;thanks for the grand tour of San Francisco, Laurie!&#151;I just got back to my room.

As Barack Obama takes the oath of office as the 44th President of the United States, he faces more challenges than most who have gone before him. While it's certainly not at the top of his to-do list, the transition to digital-only over-the-air television broadcasting is of growing concern to many Americans who rely on OTA as their only source of TV programming, and this concern has not escaped Obama's attention.

After stuffing ourselves with turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pecan and pumpkin pie&#151;a la mode for me&#151;my wife and I took in a couple of movies over the long holiday weekend. As it happened, the experience clearly demonstrated the differences between film and digital projection.