LATEST ADDITIONS

A two-day stop in San Francisco on Fujitsu's road show last week was enough time to let me scoot downtown and scope out the company's new Plasmavision 42 display. Jon Iverson and I were mighty impressed by it last month at the Consumer Electronics Show, where it was demonstrated under less-than-ideal conditions. This month, in a suite on the 35th floor of the ANA Hotel, the Plasmavision once again stood out as an exceptional feat of engineering.

At the upcoming <A HREF="http://www.nab.org/conventions/">National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show</A>, <A HREF="http://www.sony.com/">Sony Electronics</A> will be showing a full line of professional products to enable DTV implementation in 1998. The company's Business and Professional Group recently unveiled its strategy and plans, which include interfacing SDTV and HDTV formats for all DTV applications through an MPEG2 environment, the industry's global standard for DTV broadcasting.

According to statistics released January 20 by the Arlington, Virginia-based <A HREF="http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association</A> (CEMA), sales to dealers of projection televisions, TV/VCR combinations, VCRs, and camcorders each climbed in 1997 to record-setting levels. The new Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) players also showed well, selling nearly 350,000 units since the product's inception in April.

Just in case you were planning to use your computer for watching and possibly copying DVD movies in the near future, Compaq Computer Corporation, Gateway 2000 Inc., Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM Corporation, Micron Electronics, Inc., and Packard Bell/NEC are now licensed to incorporate Macrovision's DVD analog copy-protection technology in their personal-computer products.