LATEST ADDITIONS

When the hard-disk–based personal video recorder (PVR) products like TiVo and ReplayTV hit the shelves last year, they brought a new flexibility to time-shifting television programming. But the first products still had shortcomings: What could you do if you wanted to time-shift two programs from two different channels simultaneously? Buy two machines?

It's no secret that plenty of commodities cost more in Europe than they do in the United States. Gasoline, for example, is typically two to three times more expensive on the eastern side of the Atlantic.

Video projectors keep getting smaller, lighter, and better looking&mdash;especially from companies like <A HREF="http://www.infocus.com">InFocus Corporation</A>. InFocus choose the recent INFOCOMM show in Las Vegas, held June 13&ndash;15, to debut the new LP530 digital video projector, which incorporates Sage's FLI2200 deinterlacer. The FLI2200 is the world's first 10-bit single-chip motion adaptive deinterlacer, with Faroudja's deinterlacing and post-processing algorithms to convert standard interlaced video signals into progressive scan signals. The resulting image is said to be among the best available, with an absolute minimum of motion artifacts, flicker, or color irregularities.

More Ben-Hur than Spartacus, director Ridley Scott's Gladiator is painted with broad strokes of sentimentality, gory violence, and New Age spirituality.