Audio Video News

Motorola parts with Proview: Motorola' plan to return to the television market after more than 30 years has been derailed by a rift with Proview International Holdings Ltd's Moxell Technology, the Chinese manufacturing company hired by Motorola to make its flat-panel sets. Proview is the world's largest assembler of computer monitors, according to the electronics industry press.

Video-on-demand: The Holy Grail of the cable industry, VOD is getting a boost from underutilized ("dark") fiber optic networks. Early attempts at VOD were glitchy at best, but computer technology is increasingly making the service a reality via large-capacity servers that can offer thousands of hours of programming to thousands of digital cable subscribers. Many of the fiber networks are owned by telecommunications companies that lease use to cable providers. Cox Communications Inc., Time Warner Inc., and Comcast Corporation have all bet heavily on the potential of fiber optics to deliver more to their subscribers. "80% to 90% of the fiber installed during the telecom boom is still sitting unused," reports Peter Grant in a recent analysis in <I>The Wall Street Journal</I>.

You might have thought that the best way to see the Summer Olympics was to brave long security lines, eat lots of calamari, down a few Mythos beers, and pay through the nose for the "cheap" seats at Athens Stadium. But InFocus Corporation thinks they have a better idea. They humbly suggest staying in the comfort of your own home and watching the hundreds of hours of HD Olympic coverage on a huge screen (up to 11 feet wide) courtesy of their newest High Definition home entertainment front projector, the ScreenPlay 5000.

Video projectors are massive and cumbersome, right? Think again. How about a projector the size and weight of a desktop telephone, with full HDTV capability? That's what Wilsonville, Oregon-based InFocus Corporation is promising with its new UltraLight X350, part of its Proxima line of products.

At only three pounds, the X350 is among the most portable projectors ever made. That alone would be sufficient incentive for most corporate buyers. The UltraLight, however, is aimed at a bigger market: the millions of movie fans who have the enthusiasm but not the space for a traditional projector. Proxima makes its incredible performance: weight ratio possible by incorporating the latest "smart" electronics and Texas Instruments-developed Digital Light Processing technology.

Video projectors keep getting smaller, lighter, and better looking&mdash;especially from companies like <A HREF="http://www.infocus.com">InFocus Corporation</A>. InFocus choose the recent INFOCOMM show in Las Vegas, held June 13&ndash;15, to debut the new LP530 digital video projector, which incorporates Sage's FLI2200 deinterlacer. The FLI2200 is the world's first 10-bit single-chip motion adaptive deinterlacer, with Faroudja's deinterlacing and post-processing algorithms to convert standard interlaced video signals into progressive scan signals. The resulting image is said to be among the best available, with an absolute minimum of motion artifacts, flicker, or color irregularities.

InFocus today announced plans to reintroduce the ScreenPlay line of DLP projectors at the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) show that opens tomorrow in Amsterdam.

Liv Ullmann, Julia Dufvenius, and Ingmar Bergman during the shooting of Saraband "No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul."— Ingmar Bergman14...