LATEST ADDITIONS

When Tom Norton reviewed the <A HREF="http://www.guidetohometheater.com/showarchives.cgi?19">Toshiba 50H81 HD-ready 16:9 rear-projection television</A>'s 40-inch baby brother, he raved about the picture quality. In the May 2002 issue, Norton sets out to see if the 50-inch upgrade continues the Toshiba tradition.

<A HREF="www.thomson-multimedia.com">Thomson Multimedia</A> announced July 12 that it has joined the Motion Picture Engineering Group Licensing Authority's (MPEG LA) LLC MPEG-2 patent pool as of July 1. The MPEG LA LLC licensing program was launched in 1997 to assure the growth and interoperability of digital video by "providing fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory access to worldwide patent rights that are essential for the MPEG-2 Video and System standards," the announcement stated.

Imagine that General Motors or Ford or DaimlerChrysler held a patent on the internal-combustion engine, of which only one model was available to vehicle manufacturers worldwide. That's similar to the situation faced by projector manufacturers who wish to use that most wondrous of Texas Instruments technologies, Digital Light Processing (DLP), which packs more than a million micromirrors onto a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) chip approximately the size of a 35mm slide. (If you're unfamiliar with DMD, be sure to read "From Cathode Ray to Digital Micromirror: A History of Electronic Projection Display," at <A HREF="http://www.dlp.com/dlp/resources/whitepapers/pdf/titj03.pdf">www.dlp.com....)