LATEST ADDITIONS

Toshiba's press conference revealed many new models of LCD TVs—in fact, the company admitted that its product cycle is now closer to six months than one year in order to get new technology to market sooner and to remain cost-competitive for the key holiday selling season. Among the new sets in the upscale REGZA line is the XV series, which sports a "double-skin" cabinet with a cool 3D look and Pixel Pure 4G processing. Also new is Super Resolution Technology (SRT), which is said to upscale standard-def material to HD resolution far better than what is available in most TVs. Another new feature is AutoView, which dynamically adjusts all settings according to an ambient light sensor and detects film-based content.

LCD projectors are among the most cost-effective ways of getting a <I>really</I> big picture, and Panasonic's offerings have shown steady improvement over the last two generations of 1080p models. Now comes the third-gen PT-AE3000, which improves on its predecessors in three ways. First, it has an advanced optical system with manually aligned aspherical glass lenses.

Canadian speaker manufacturer PSB has released a new line of speakers designed to be affordable, while maintaining an extremely high quality sound and construction. The new speaker line, if you can imagine it, is called "Imagine." ...

If you look closely in this picture of the chaos that immediately followed the Sony press conference, you’ll see…chaos. If you look a little closer, you’ll see some pencil-thin speakers (actually, I think the term they used was “the width of a finger” but I may have been in the middle of a mile-high altitude-induced alcohol-enhanced stupor at the time so it might as easily have been “the width of a fingerling potato”) on display here as part of the BDV-IT1000ES - Sony’s first ES HTiB that includes an integrated Blu-ray Disc player. The main speakers each measure approximately .75-inch wide by 22 inches long, and they’ll come with the rest of the system when it ships in October and you fork over the required $1,999.