OK, I'm funnin.' It's just the GEO, not the GEO Metro. I like crap car references (excluding any Geo Metro owners who might be reading this, of course!).

You have to hand it to Silicon Optix. Not too many chip makers can hold the short attention of a video reviewer for a whole hour during a busy trade show. Showmanship!

In addition to the HD DVD HQV Benchmark, Silicon Optix was showing off the GEO avanced geometry processor. A complement to SO's vaunted REALTA and REON scaling, deinterlacing and processing chips, the GEO has a remarkable feature set that will be a major boon for front and rear projection sets.

First, in rear projection applications the GEO will offer an inexpensive solution for electronically altering the image to allow shorter internal throws and therefore much shallower cabinet depths. To accomplish this mechanically with optics is inherently expensive to manufacturers.

But this chip set also offers some huge benefits for panel alignment in three-chip displays. Alignemnt of the three panels is absolutely critical in getting a crisp, sharp image and it's a common failing in three-chip displays.

Another alignment related issue is color fringing, which shows as one of the colors fringing out at the sides of what is supposed to be a white line. This can be caused by chrmoatic aberration in lenses, but according to SO it is also caused by timing differences between the red, green and blue signals that are separated by a prism in the light path and then sent to the red, green and blue imaging chips in a three-chip display. The GEO corrects these timing errors to eliminating the softening effects that accompany these alignment issues.

In other words, this SO solution has the potential to eliminate some serious image degrading artifacts in three-chip designs. That's making the display world a better place to be!

BTW, the blacks on that Pioneer plasma aren't the milky gray you see here. I don't have a GEO in my digital camera to fix that particular aberration!