LATEST ADDITIONS

Within seconds of firing up Miramax's DVD release of the classic Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night, I knew that the Fab Four had been deep-sixed by the new set's producers. The image quality is excellent-the movie appears for the first time in a widescreen (1.66:1) video transfer-but the music is another story.

A red laser–based Advanced Optical Disc (AOD) format system developed by Toshiba and NEC has been chosen by the DVD Forum as the standard for next-generation high-definition DVD players. The DVD Forum will develop AOD specs and publish them in the spring, according to the Nikkei news service. NEC said it would release AOD drives for PCs next year. Toshiba plans to market AOD home recorders in 2004.

DTV bodes well for the Korean electronics industry: Korean television manufacturers better than tripled their volume of digital TV exports in the first nine months of this year, compared to the same period last year.

<A HREF="http://www.runco.com">Runco International</A> has introduced two new widescreen flat-panel plasma monitors. Both are 16:9 units offering true high-definition performance, supporting 720p in its native resolution.