LATEST ADDITIONS

Photo illustration by John Wilkes This year's Sound & Vision Reviewer's Choice Awards feature a number of home- entertainment firsts, including JVC's GR-HD1 high-definition camcorder, Sony's RDR-GX7 DVD recorder, which supports both the DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW formats, and Yamaha's MusicCAST, the first Wi-Fi music system from a m

Liquid Crystal on Silicon or LCOS technology is clearly hot in the HDTV market. <A HREF="http://www.microdisplay.com">MicroDisplay Corporation</A> announced last week that it his introduced a single panel 1920 x 1080 LCOS microdisplay with resolution of two million pixels. The company says the new chip is designed for front and rear projection televisions.

<A HREF="http://www.brilliancorp.com">Brillian Corporation</A> announced last week that it has entered the 720p and 1080p high-definition television product market. Having developed its first 720p rear-projection HDTV platform in the third quarter of 2003, the company says it is now offering its liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCOS) Gen II microdisplay-based digital television to brand-name original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), who will be offered an opportunity to rebrand Brillian's digital televisions.

During a panel discussion at the recent Home Entertainment 2003 show in San Francisco, a few of the panelists (including me) indicated that, despite all the new flat-screen imaging technologies found in front projectors, rear-projection TVs, and plasma and LCD monitors, our preference was still for images created by CRTs. A manufacturer's representative on the panel retorted that CRTs were fine in their day, but that his company was in the business of providing the nearest thing to a theater experience in the home&mdash;and CRTs just don't cut the mustard anymore.