Tom Norton

Sharp announced the construction of a new 10th generation LCD plant in Sakai City, Japan, a huge facility on 314 acres of land, 30 times the area of Yankee Stadium. The mother glass that this plant can handle will be 1.6 times the size of that produced in the current Kamayama plant. Each 10th gen mother glass can be cut into six 60" displays, eight 50", or fifteen 40", greatly increasing production efficiency.

Fresh from flooring virtually everyone (apart from the competition) with its latest line of Kuro flat panel plasma displays, Pioneer is showing two new concept displays at the show: a future design that offers even better blacks, and a new, super-flat model.

Blame Sony's Chief Boss Howard Stringer for commenting that OLED sounds like a Norse god. But it's not. It's an ultra flat display technology with an inherently outstanding black level. Last year, Sony showed a number of small 11-inch models, together with a slightly larger prototype. The display was essentially the same this year, except that the design has been refined and the 11-incher is actually on sale now for $2500. OLED is currently expensive to manufacturer in larger screen sizes, and reportedly has a shorter life than LCD and plasma displays. But the pictures on these small screens sure looked fantastic.

Deckard is a Blade Runner. His job is to seek out and eliminate Replicants who….oh, never mind. If you need me to describe the plot of <I>Blade Runner</I> in detail then you must be new to the entire movie game. If you haven't seen it, you should discover it for yourself. And if your reaction is typical you'll likely be blown away by this new 5-disc HD DVD boxed set from Warner Brothers (also available on Blu-ray). (Much of this material is also available on a multi-disc DVD package, but be careful; the 4-disc standard DVD set omits the work print version of the film described below.)