Watch your carbon footprint grow fainter with Sharp's completely solar-run LCD TV. The sleek 26-inch wide, 20 mm-thick prototype made its grand debut this week at the G8's Summit's Zero Emission House. Appropriate timing considering what a hot topic the environment has been at this year's summit.

Want some real home theater bragging rights? Instead of buying a projector capable of casting a 14-foot image at 1080p (progressive) resolution-the highest high-definition there is-build one yourself. After all, the front projector´s innards are simple: an LCD lit by a superbright lamp, and a few lenses to magnify and sharpen the image. Retail models start at around $800 and use proprietary $400 lamps that burn out every few years. But cheaper lamps work equally well, and none of the other parts are very expensive. Why not put one together yourself?

Although Lumenlab has greatly simplified the LCD projector project with its ready-made parts, it´s still not a job for the DIY newbie. You´ll need carpentry skills to create an enclosure and wiring skills to connect all the parts without electrocuting yourself or burning down your projector. And then there´s the LCD panel stripping-even PopSci photographer John Carnett, a lifetime DIY guy, killed the first LCD TV we sent him.

First there were big screens. Then big flat screens. Now there are big flat screens packed with tricks, like the ability to record TV or access your home network. It’s all part of the push to minimize the number of decor-busting black boxes while maximizing entertainment choices—movies, slideshows, your music collection. Here are five reasons to chuck your TV in favor of a multitalented model.

1. The Laptop Impersonator
This 2.7-inch-thin flat screen takes its cue from the computer world, with two PC-card slots to handle its latest features.

Enter a showroom this fall and you'll find the widest selection of big-screen HDTVs ever, each incorporating different tech. There are hang-on-the-wall plasma and LCD sets, along with DLP (digital light processing), LCD, and LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) rear-projection TVs. Follow these guidelines: Look for a brightness rating of at least 400 candelas per meter squared (expressed as cd/m2), which is double the brightness of a typical direct-view set. Insist on a contrast ratio (the visual difference between the blackest black and the whitest white) of 400:1.