The first teaser trailer for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has been put online exclu­sively over at MSN. I didn’t like it all that much but it seems to con­tinue with all the funny lines. This time around Rick O’Connell’s son Alex unearths the mummy of the first Emperor of Qin. The Dragon Emperor (Jet Li) and his 10,000 sol­diers have laid in a tomb for quite a few thou­sand years because a double-crossing sor­cer­ess (Michelle Yeoh) has put them in sus­pended ani­ma­tion. After hav­ing awak­ened the for­got­ten ruler he obvi­ously has a prob­lem and is seek­ing the help of his parents …

There’s only one really obvi­ous draw­back: Rachel Weisz isn’t in this movie. Instead, Maria Bello will take over her role as Rick O’Connell’s wife. Ah, we’ll see how it turns out. Check out the trailer which is also avail­able in high definition.

Well, this topic came up at work today – twice – so I thought it’s about time to write a few lines about it. Puh, where do I begin? How about this: Don’t even think about a plasma TV if you intend to buy a model with a size of less than 42 inches. It’s sim­ply not worth it. Why? Because man­u­fac­tur­ers haven’t yet fig­ured out how to cram mil­lions of pix­els on a smaller dis­play. There’s no way you’re going to enjoy HDTV on a screen with so few pix­els. Because LCD and plasma TVs are very dif­fer­ent in the way they deliver the image to the viewer, the same restric­tion doesn’t apply to LCD TVs.

So, if you want to buy a 43” or larger flat panel HDTV, there are quite a few things to con­sider. First, there’s the color. A plasma dis­play cov­ers a far greater area of the vis­i­ble light spec­trum and deliv­ers more dynamic col­ors than a LCD does. Plus, a plasma dis­play has supe­rior black lev­els. Good black lev­els are impor­tant to pro­vide a sense of depth. As far as the con­trast and the black lev­els are con­cerned, the plasma is supe­rior. Color accu­racy is not so eas­ily deter­mined, though. That depends on room light, man­u­fac­turer and model, but as a rule you can assume that a plasma will pre­vail in a room with nor­mal or lower light­ing. LCDs should per­form bet­ter in brightly lit rooms. (That hap­pens because plasma TVs have a glass sur­face where a mir­ror effect can take place when extremely bright light shines on it.) Then again, your liv­ing room shouldn’t be as brightly lit as it is the case with many show-rooms. All in all, the plasma has the advantage.

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