LATEST ADDITIONS

The consumer electronics industry has a unique way of making a mess of things. Take HDTV, for example. Competing and completely different connection standards have made a mess of what should be a simple but substantial advancement in picture quality. Analog connections are fine, but they don't have the copy-protection capability to appease content providers. Then there's IEEE 1394, a copy-protected and network-enabled solution that only works with displays that have built-in HDTV decoders. Finally, you have the digital visual interface (DVI), a modified computer-display connection. DVI works well with satellite and cable systems that use interactive program guides, but it uses an expensive connection type that's difficult to run longer than 10 to 15 feet.