See, when I look at magazines (often), I get all frustrated that, like, the stupid things won't just read themselves at me. Like how the TV reads itself at me.

I am a busy sort of guy, and I don't have time to interpret symbols into words and words into mental images. Let's cut out the middleman, I say. That's exactly why I was so thrilled to see this announcement on the internet for an announcement in a magazine. While the first announcement had to be read the old fashioned way, wasting valuable minutes and brainpower, the latter announcement, the magazine one, will actually be in video format. It will announce CBS's fall schedule, and it will announce how delicious Pepsi is and how you should buy it. (With money, and soon.)

The magazine video uses a 2.7 mm thick LCD screen with a tiny rechargeable battery. The screen has a 320 x 240 resolution, and the chip it's on can hold about 40 minutes of video.

I was kind of thinking that the wave of the future, as far as video-zines go (my term, so hands off), would employ OLED technology, seeing has OLED screens can be super thin and flexible. But OLED displays are still way expensive, and while CBS no doubt wants to impress the New York and LA subscribers to Entertainment Weekly with their extravagance, they don't want to impress them with that much extravagance. Not for Jenna Elfman.

Um... very briefly, I believe that LCD screens work by altering the shape of a layer of film in front of a light to change the color of light that passes through that film. When the film has lots of little cells, the cells can be altered individually to make the tiny dots that form a video image. OLED screens, on the other hand, are sort of like screens made up of thousands of the little LED lights you find all over the place, except the LEDs on the screen are very very small—they're actually made of organic compounds printed on the screen, and they're activated (made to emit light) by having electricity flow to specific spots on that screen. More or less. So, once again, add lots of these little bits of light up, and you have an image. And hopefully someday some brave and proud network will put OLEDs in a magazine, to make it easier for us to learn about season 14 of two and a half men. (At that point it will be 2.5 men because Charlie Sheen will be dead, and his character will be computer animated. A half man, if you will. Or maybe the kid will cross dress every other episode.)

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