Scott Wilkinson

This Thursday is the national pig-out known as Thanksgiving, followed by the national sellout known as Black Friday, the official start of the holiday shopping season. Retailers normally give thanks at this time for the sales that represent a major percentage of their annual business, but this year, they're likely to have much less for which to be thankful.

DVRs (digital video recorders) give advertisers and broadcasters fits. These wondrous devices allow viewers to quickly skip over commercials, compressing an hour-long show to under 50 minutes and avoiding all those annoying ads. But wait—those ads are what pay for the program itself, so if few people watched them, they'd lose their value, and the programs would dwindle and finally disappear.

Joel Hoekstra asks a couple of common questions about TV specs:

Anyone who has read my TV reviews knows I'm not a big fan of the audio systems built into most models. They usually sound thin and closed in, and there's not much stereo separation, to say nothing of surround sound. So when Mitsubishi announced a new line of LCD TVs with an integrated sound bar, I sat up and took notice.