To quote Professor Farnsworth on <I>Futurama</I>, "Good news, everyone!" I figured out how to answer reader questions in my blog (not that it was all that difficult). Now that my company e-mail account is up and running, you can simply send your questions to me at:

Last year, I started hearing about front projectors that use LEDs for illumination instead of conventional lamps&#151;in fact, there were a couple of prototypes being demonstrated in back rooms and hotel suites at the 2008 CEDIA Expo. Then, at CES 2009, I saw another such a projector from Taiwan-based <A href="http://www.vivitekcorp.com">Vivitek</A>. Six months later, the H9080FD is almost ready to become the world's first commercially available, LED-illuminated home-theater projector.

I already blogged about the Lexicon BD-30 universal Blu-ray player, but no one outside the company knew before the show that it has received THX certification. At the Lexicon booth, I also learned that it can decode DVD-Audio and SACD and send multichannel PCM via HDMI, a great feature in this $3500 player. The BD-30 is pictured here with the MC-12HD pre/pro, which just received a firmware update that lets it accept a 7.1-channel PCM bitstream from Blu-rays that offer it&#151;the previous version was limited to 5.1 PCM.

As expected, LG's TV lineup for 2011 includes more 3D models and more network connectivity, which is quickly turning out to be the TV story at the show. Out of 31 new LCD TVs, 10 are 3D-capable, and all but five are what LG calls Smart TVs; of the 12 new plasmas, eight are 3D and four are Smart TVs. In both cases, many models include both feature sets. Also, two-thirds of the LCD TVs use LED edgelighting or backlighting.

There are two big tech stories here. First, the LED-edgelit 3D models use passive-polarized glasses instead of active-shutter glasses, a technology LG calls Film-Pattern Retarder (FPR), which I'll discuss in more detail in a following post. Second, the top three LCD TVs—which reach up to 72 inches diagonally—are LED-backlit with local dimming using a technology LG calls Nano Full LED, in which the LEDs are smaller than usual and deliver brighter, cleaner, smoother local dimming in a cabinet less then one inch thick.