Fox and MGM joined the Blu-ray studios in ramping up its support for the HD format in a major way. It announced that its major release titles will be day and date with DVD from now on, including movies currently in theaters like Night at the Museum and Eragon when they're released to home video later this year.

Although no products were officially announced, Olevia demonstrated prototype LCDs with a 120Hz refresh rate that produced noticeably smoother motion compared to the 60Hz model next to it.

Sherwood Newcastle was showing a static display of its next-gen R-972 AVR, which will feature HDMI 1.3 and offer full decoding of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio lossless.

Here's a cut-away of the Polk in-floor sub. Start tearing up the hard wood!

The Thiel room was a full home theater setup using their new CS 3.7 speakers with Sim2’s C3X DLP projector and a 110”-wide screen. The three chip C3X is quite a good 720p projector when it comes to filling large screens and the newest model, the HT3000, is a 1080p single chip DLP at about the same price. Though the picture was good, it was the sound that blew me away. Never have I heard Thiel speakers sound like this. Then came the shocker: They turned off the active shielding on the Synergistic Research Tesla Series cables (interconnects, speaker cables, and power cords) and much of the magic just disappeared. Either these cords sound real bad with the power off or real good with it on or maybe both, because the difference was far from subtle and was easily the most impressive cable demo I’ve ever heard. These newest cables, much smaller than before, are expensive but not out of reach and certainly deserve investigation for any high-end home theater sound system.

Did the HD DVD Group announce a bunch of hot HD DVD titles that will be coming our way in ’07? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? HD DVD’s supporting studios will be releasing an awesome slate of new release and catalog titles, but for myself and fellow sci-fi buffs many of these pale compared to this double whammy: Not only has Warner announced that 2007 is the year that Ridley Scott’s classic Blade Runner will see a remastered release in HD, the remastered versions of the original Star Trek series will be released by Paramount on HD DVD this year as well. Someone pick me up off the floor!

Samsung announced major improvements to its line of LCD TVs. For 2007, it's adding several technologies designed to increase contrast ratio, improve blacks, and reduce motion blur. Super Clear Panel adds a filter to cut down on stray light. Local Dimming adds LED backlighting which treats specific areas of the screen, where needed, to increase contrast ratio up to a claimed 100,000:1. And Double Frame Rate 120 Hz is said to reduce motion blur.