The Home Entertainment 2004 Show (HE2004) is coming to NYC May 20–23, 2004 at the Hilton New York Hotel & Towers. HE2004 is open to the public—consumers will not only have the opportunity to see, hear, and demo the finest high-performance products consumer electronics has to offer, they can also attend a dozen free educational seminars on a variety of topics and enjoy live music daily from jazz and blues artists during relaxing breaks for lunch. The educational seminars and music luncheons will be offered all three days of the Show. Seminars will be moderated by some of the consumer electronics industry's most respected editors, manufacturers, and custom-installation professionals.

DTV sales soar: Digital television products are flying off the shelves, according to statistics presented by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention held in Las Vegas in mid-April. Shipments of DTV products increased more than 124% in January and February of this year, compared to the same period in 2003, reaching a total of $1.3 billion in revenue. During the two months, 853,443 DTV units went from factories to dealers. More than 9.73 million DTV products—defined as "integrated sets and monitors displaying active vertical scanning lines of at least 480p"—have been sold since 1998, CEA spokesmen stated.

Steven Stone gets his hands on the InFocus ScreenPlay 5700 DLP projector and stacks it up against the competition. "Perhaps," SS explains, "the new ScreenPlay 5700 will help tilt the scales of consumer interest more towards DLPs."

This month, Integra Research should begin delivering the RDV-1.1, a high-performance universal disc player announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The THX Ultra-certified RDV-1.1 not only plays every current optical disc format, including DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, CD, and SACD, but includes a video scaler that upconverts ordinary DVDs to 720p or 1080i. The internal "O-Plus FlexScale" video scaler also works with external video sources connected to the RDV-1.1's unit's rear-panel component, composite, and S-video inputs.