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Space constraints are among the biggest obstacles retailers encounter when selling home entertainment systems. Many people object to the proliferation of equipment needed to play several different formats of video and audio recordings.

Despite holiday season signs of an economic slowdown, the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org/">Consumer Electronics Association</A> is projecting a record year for 2001. CEA figures released at the end of December predict that factory-to-dealer shipments will increase to $95 billion, a significant improvement from the $89.7 billion total this year. Results for both 2000 and 1999 were up approximately $5 billion from the previous years' predictions. For that reason, the CEA may revise its predictions. A revision with predictions for individual product categories should appear during January's Consumer Electronics Show.

Twenty bucks buys plenty of processing power these days. If you're a manufacturer shopping for a DVD chip, <A HREF="http://www.cirruslogic.com/">Cirrus Logic Corporation's Crystal Semiconductor</A> has just what you're looking for. The San Mateo, CA-based company is now shipping its "98k"&mdash;an all-purpose, stand-alone DVD decoding device versatile enough to let designers write their own control code.

Recordable DVD . . . Need We Say More? Probably.

Here it is. The moment you've been waiting for. Recordable DVD! That's right. That last remaining excuse for you not to buy a DVD player has finally been expunged, at least to some extent. While they made announcements at last January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, manufacturers are just now following through on their release plans for recordable DVD players. As usual, the excuse was copyright issues, that never-ending thorn in home theater's side. Panasonic finally sent us a sample of the DMR-E10 DVD-RAM player, which should be available for the holiday season and, if nothing else, is just one of the coolest products to come along since DVD first came out.