Entertainment: Movies, TV, HDTV

If your PC is going to host a film festival, or if you're a budding Hitchcock, consider a widescreen LCD. These monitors are wider than they are tall and display images in a 16:9 aspect ratio, the same as film and DVD. With widescreen, movies made in your living room or in a Hollywood studio will fill up the whole LCD - no more letterbox bars running along the top and bottom of the image.

???? If you're considering TV, watch for high definition LCDs. These displays meet the High Definition TV standard, which requires a resolution of at least 1920x1080, and offer the same extremely sharp image as HDTV. HDTV stands for High Definition Television, which is a subset of the new ATSC Digital Television (or Digital TV) specification. HDTV commonly refers to either 1080i or 720p formats. The 1080i format consists of 1080 lines of resolution in interlace scanning (the 'I' is for short for interlaced scanning), whereas the 720p format is comprised of 720 lines of resolution in progressive scanning (the 'P' stands for progressive scanning) sets. Thanks to being on the cutting edge, these displays are expensive ( just like HDTVs). But in the not-too-distant-future all TV programming will be available in HDTV.