Rob Medich

It's the talk of the Strip.

Everyone at CES who's had the privilege of witnessing Pioneer Electronic's future generation Kuro plasma in action wants to tell someone. That's because it's been like no other experience they've had while watching TV.

Could this be the Blockbuster-buster? The Netflix-kiss-of-death? The gear that will make Blu-ray blue?

Except for the color bursting from the reception-area movie posters - The Double Life of Veronique, Black Orpheus, and the Beastie Boys Video Anthology among them - the Criterion Collection's new Park Avenue South headquarters in Manhattan are styled in the same palette as many of the films that the company painstakingly restores and releases on DVD: black and white, with profound gray area

It was an epic effort requiring superhuman vision and hearing and, above all, heroic resolve. For in order to download the high-definition version of Superman Returns onto Microsoft's Xbox 360 at the Sound & Vision video lab, I, too, would have to return - and return, and return ...