Featured Gear

Like swimmers in some Darwinian gene pool, DVD recorders are quickly mutating to fill every possible niche. Yet as they evolve, you can count on finding a core set of features in most decks - a TV tuner, a VCR-style timer, and a handful of recording "modes" that let you trade picture quality for playback time.

Speaker maker JBL is just one part of the Harman International family, but for a brand that makes up only a single slice of a large pie, it has an incredibly diverse product mix. Along with home theater speakers, JBL makes systems for music-recording and film sound-mixing studios, movie theaters, concert halls, computers, and cars.

I've been impressed by the image quality of many of the 1080p HDTVs I've seen lately, but to me the biggest surprise over the last year has been the excellent pictures produced by variants on LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) technology. LCoS uses light reflected from silicon chips covered with liquid crystals - 1080p models boast more than 2 million pixels' worth.