I live in Washington, DC, and as the old adage goes, the Union is most secure when the Congress is not in session. Well, Congress has been in session more or less continuously for the last few weeks, and, as usual, little good has come of it, even in the home-theater arena. But I've been in Washington long enough to have coined my own truism about life in the nation's capital: Beware any trade group that says it is performing a public service. Usually it is serving only itself.
Everyone who visits this site knows that high-definition DVDs are nearly here. Most everyone also knows that, like many great advances in consumer electronics, a format war seems almost certain to doom this one.
I was in Beijing for work a few weeks ago, and one free morning I wandered down the street toward the Forbidden City to do a little shopping. As usual, a virtual army of street hawkers greeted me with pirated DVDs by the handful. In previous trips I paid no attention, but this time I decided to have a look. After all, they cost just $1 each. So out of curiosity I decided to buy a few as a journalism experiment, since I write about issues like this.
These are days of uncertainty and foment in the world of digital television. Everything seems to be in flux—except the sales figures for digital TVs. They are on an inexorable climb north. But consider some of the other debates festering under the glitter that manufacturers like to throw into the air.
Here's a piece of really bad news for all 10 million of us who own digital television sets that are more than six months old. You won't be able to watch the new high-definition DVDs in high definition unless you buy a new TV. Whose to blame for this? Hollywood, of course.
My office made a small change last month. For all the 70 people who spend much of their days working at their computers, the company decided it was time to "upgrade" our monitors to flat-screen LCDs. Like most of corporate America, we had been using CRT computer monitors for decades. But somewhere in the bowels of the company's system-support offices, somebody got the idea that LCDs were easier on the eyes than CRTs. Or so they said.