Ken C. Pohlmann

Sure, many people's entire music library is now in their jeans pocket, and the playback space is somewhere between their left and right earbuds. That's cool. Other folks are into fancy home theaters and surround sound. Cool.

As you'll recall, Paramount came up a loser in the HD DVD/Blu-ray battle. Its exclusive support for HD DVD proved to be as adept as the $100 I put on Big Brown at Belmont. DFL, as they say. Anyway, Paramount is now embracing its inner Blu — kind of. Its first BD movies were released on May 20 (with the corpse of poor HD DVD still warm in its grave).

Audio and video placeshifting technology: That's what Sling Media does, and does well. If you just got back from the ISS (motto: "Urine doesn't taste so bad!") you might not know about SlingBox. Slingbox "slings" AV signals.

Consider something really bright (like the sun on a sunny day) and something really dark (like under your covers at night). That span from light to dark can be expressed as a contrast ratio; the human eye has good ability in that regard. Now consider your TV. The brights aren't exactly blinding, and the darks are gray.

Without question, Sony's XEL-1 is one sweet TV. Its OLED display, the first in a commercially available TV, is wafer thin, its colors are vibrant, and the contrast ratio is outstanding. Be sure to see it, and don't wait too long. Because it might not last very long.