Mike Wood

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Projector Reviews
TAW HD-800 CRT Front Projector
Mike Wood  |  Jan 18, 2001  |  Published: Jan 19, 2001
"It's not dead yet! In fact, it looks like it's going for a walk."

Monty Python's take on the plague in the Middle Ages could just as easily be applied to the CRT-based front-projector market. Pundits have long proclaimed that CRT technology, at least 30 to 40 years old and an admitted setup and maintenance hassle, is dead, or at least in its last years of life. Upstarts like DLP and D-ILA and adolescents like LCD are ready to take CRT's place in the front-projector market. Then, as other consumer-projector manufacturers close their doors, a new CRT company pops up.

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The 2002 Direct-View HDTV Face Off
Mike Wood  |  Jan 01, 2003  |  Published: Jan 02, 2003
Four manufacturers go head to head in our HDTV Demolition Derby.

What could be better than a head-to-head competition between four direct-view HDTVs and HD monitors? How about four direct-view HDTVs modified to function as robot-smashing dump trucks, then placed in a ring to beat each other's video-processing brains out! OK, so the Home Theater version of garage/robot wars didn't quite come to fruition. Budgets, deadlines, and wisdom greater than mine prevailed, and we stuck with our tried-and-true formula: several judges and several products, all in the same room at the same time. Still, the resulting upset was exciting.

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The Monster TV Face Off
Mike Wood  |  Mar 06, 2002  |  Published: Mar 07, 2002
Ten HD-ready and two HDTV rear-projection televisions lock heads in a battle to the death.

Hi, my name is Mike, and I have a problem. My problem is that I open my big mouth during editorial meetings. Sure, I have some good ideas (like the van-speakers story, which I mentioned as a joke yet everybody loved it—you people are weird). But, for every good idea, there's a multitude of crappy ones. It's a statistical-average thing. Unfortunately, the ideas that editor Maureen Jenson seems to like are the big, time-consuming, and labor-intensive ones. Take this Face Off, for example. We had a couple of sets already. I figured I'd invite other manufacturers, get one or two more sets, and have a good, manageable comparison. It's just my luck that nearly every manufacturer decided to participate.

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Other Source Component Reviews
Toshiba SD-9200 Progressive-Scan DVD-Audio/Video Player
Mike Wood  |  Feb 28, 2001  |  Published: Mar 01, 2001
Toshiba's SD-9200 and Onkyo's DV-S939 are part of a new breed of what might as well be called "super" DVD players. Like a handful of others, they're high-quality DVD players that offer a progressive-scan video output and can decode the high-resolution audio signal from DVD-Audio recordings. With the category becoming almost appliancelike, these players are a welcome addition to any writer's queue of review products.
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Toshiba TW56X81 Rear-Projection Television
Mike Wood  |  Mar 28, 2000  |  Published: Mar 29, 2000
A "choose your own adventure" television.

I might be dating myself (or just admitting more than I should), but as a kid I used to read a lot of those "choose your own adventure" books. You know, the ones where a junior adventurer goes looking for Mayan treasure, and, at the end of each page, the reader must choose which subsequent page to turn to and thus which path the story will take. Sometimes, you'd end up dead; other times, you'd strike it rich. The books were a literary video game. It was pretty much the only thing my parents could get me to read (hence the lack of Hemingway influence in my writing).

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