Warner revealed some critical details for its Total HD disc format, which will have Blu-ray and HD DVD transfers on opposite sides of the same disc.

Blood Diamond's IME feature goes farther than Warner's previous efforts in two respects. First, rather than having to wait for the PIP video material to come up, the user can hit the left or right cursors to skip to fro the chapters with IME material. Second, a gold disc icon appears during the film indicating "Focus Points," and hitting enter when this icon is on-screen removes the viewer to a more substantial, out of band feature rather than in band PIP. Not quite U-Control, but pretty cool. Previous IMEs haven't been icon-driven- you simply had to find them and couldn't exercise this much control over the experience.

Interviews are what go on behind closed doors at JVC, and demos for Shane are not. After getting the download on JVC’s demo of a new $7K D-ILA front projector, compared side by side with Sony’s highly regarded Ruby $10K SXRD projector, I motored right over to see the shootout only to be turned away at the door. Someone from JVC was being interviewed I was told, and could I wait outside just a few minutes.

It's unfortunate but sometimes review products arrive DOA, or don't work properly right from the get go. And when this happens, it puts everyone in a bad spot. Our policy here at UAV, which is a good one, is that any product sent for review gets one, even if the product malfunctions. No one gets a break on a defective product. However, when a component is dead or defective from the get-go we can't even spend enough time with it to write a meaningful paragraph. And if four or five interesting and functional products are lined up behind it, it's easy to just move on to the other products and wait for a replacement.