Thomas J. Norton

There's an interesting story behind the photo of the Samsung rear projection set that appears on the home page and in the product review. As most of you know, such photos are almost never taken directly from a television showing an actual image. Instead, the image is inserted later into a blank screen photo of the set using a computer program, most often Photoshop. This program allows nearly any photo to be resized and reconfigured to fit a television screen originally shot at any angle.

Projectors are great. Projectors are fun. Projectors give you a big, immersive, theatrical experience, which is what we all want from our home theater systems. Even a great flatscreen HDTV is just a television compared with the drama that a front-projection image provides.

So did the puppet image in the last photo turn into a Sumo wrestler? Not quite. I couldn't snag a screen shot if the puppet because of a strange interaction between the screen image and my digital camera (FM reported the same thing). But for some reason this photo came out OK. The image on the SED's screen wasn't his blue; that's a camera issue.

OK, I haven't seen Barbie. Nor do I have any intention of doing so, even it if shows up for free on a streaming service. My only...ah...exposure to Barbie was in the Toy Story franchise, where she was basically a third-stringer. But Barbie was a apparently big deal for years for young girls, who are now all grown up and yearn for nostalgia wrapped around some new-fashioned man-shaming.

But I did see Oppenheimer in my local IMAX...