Audio Video News

<I>The <A HREF="http://www.he2006.com">Home Entertainment Show 2006</A> is only weeks away, running June 1&ndash;4 at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel in Los Angeles. Here is a sampling of some of the giveaways and special events that will take place at the Show. Several of these should be of particular interest to home theater enthusiasts.</I>

HD DVDs are going to continue to trickle into stores over the next few months from Warner and Universal in particular, and French distributor Studiocanal has announced it will release 20 movies on the format this year. There's a surprising lack of coordination on the part of studios and retailers regarding the release dates of the titles.

Yeah, right, you say you brought your laptop on the plane so you could get some work done - but you and I know you really tucked it in your carry-on bag so you could watch Breakfast on Pluto without having to explain to your kids what a transvestite is. But, in addition to being a horrible place to type or do other computerized work, an airplane seat is not conducive to comfortable movie viewing, either. Thanks to the dude who has to recline all the way in the seat in front of me, I can never get the screen at the right angle to eliminate all the glare on the screen. As a result, most of the time I'm actually happy when the battery runs out before the movie ends.

This morning I picked out the weekly Best Buy flyer from my Sunday paper and saw a DirecTV HD TiVo on special for $399 after mail-in rebate. My initial thought was, "cool! Looks like the new MPEG4 compatible HD DVR is finally out!" This thought died of loneliness seconds later as I realized the HD DVR in the ad is the trusty HR10-250 that sits in my own equipment rack. A terrific machine, but not compatible with the new MPEG4 compressed HD channels that DirecTV has very quietly rolled out in the last several months.

The Home Entertainment 2006 Show June 1-4, 2006 in Los Angeles at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel, has announced a special Benefit Concert to support the Elf Foundation, a non-profit charity that creates Rooms of Magic—private entertainment theaters in children's hospitals that bring the enchantment of uplifting music and film to seriously ill children around the country. A portion of the gate from the concert will go to the Elf Foundation to support their wonderful work.

HD DVD launched in retail stores with something between a whimper and minor bang earlier this week. Although there were only two HD DVD titles from Warner available in most stores, <I>The Last Samurai</I> and <I>Phantom of the Opera</I>, Toshiba's initial, admittedly smallish run of players was sold out after just two days of availability.

ScreenTek, a company that sells laptop replacement screens (who knew there even was such a thing as a laptop replacement screen? I thought you were simply out of luck...), has developed a cleaning solution for LCD screens that are not in need of being replaced. Called PixelClean, the new screen cleaner was developed for high-gloss LCD screens like Sony XBRITE and Toshiba TruBrite - although the formulation is supposed to work as well on other types of flat-panel screens, such as less-advanced laptops, plasma TVs, and LCD TVs.