DIGITAL L.A. : MY MONITOR IS BIGGER THAN YOUR MONITOR.

Byline: David Bloom 

I recently headed down Interstate 405 to Orange County to check out a couple of new products. My first stop was at monitor manufacturer Princeton to see the new high-definition TV monitor it is putting on the market.

Princeton, which makes the monitors for Gateway Computer's Destination series of big-screen TV/computer systems, also has outfitted its AF3.OHD high-def monitor with the connectors that allow it to carry your PC's VGA, SVGA or XGA video signals.

Because it's a monitor, you'd need to spend around $1,500 to get the digital TV tuner needed to pull down over-the-air broadcasts from local TV stations (which looked really great on my visit).

But here's an even better solution, says Princeton's Phil Callahan, who directs the company's convergence and HDTV products: use a PC, with a $1,000 pair of digital TV tuner cards inside, to control the nifty set. And if that computer also has a DVD-ROM drive inside, you can (in addition to being able to surf the Net, play computer games on a huge screen and watch amazing television with great surround sound) watch pristine versions of more and more movies and other cool stuff on DVD.

I won't bore you with lots of specification talk, but the company has loaded up the machine with a ton of technological goodies that spec hounds will love, thanks to design input from Joe Kane, the digital TV guru who authored ``Video Essentials for DVD.''

The 32-inch monitor sells for $4,100, which is a lot of money, but not so much when you realize the only other high-def TV like it comes from Sony at about double the cost. For more information, go to www.princetongraphics.com.

Devil in the details

Blizzard, based in Irvine and a part of the group of gaming companies that Havas Interactive recently acquired from Cendant, has a catalog of smash hits that includes WarCraft, WarCraft 2, Diablo and last year's million-selling sales leader, StarCraft.

Now, it looks like the company has another winner. Of course, it helps that Blizzard is building a sequel to the much-loved Diablo, the huge-selling 2-D adventure game set in a forebodingly medieval world.

Though it's still a ways from done, Diablo II looks even better than its handsomely wrought predecessor. Many interface elements remain from the first game, but designers have shrunk the screen space devoted to its controls. They've also made it easier to control your character's movements, varied the way they look with different kinds of armor and weaponry, and made it easier to build up a character's skills and magic spells and to find discarded booty.

They've replaced the original Diablo's character types with five new ones: the amazon, the sorceress, the necromancer, the paladin and the barbarian. The old characters still appear in the game as non-player characters who can be recruited as allies in various miniquests that are part of the game's flow.

The new game requires four discs to hold the four sprawling ``acts'' in the game, and it generates new terrain and monsters each time you play a level.They've also doubled, to eight, the number of players who can fight over Blizzard's great Battle.net online gaming center. If you want a peek, surf over to www.blizzard.com.

Driven crazy

Having just survived the holiday weekend's driving adventures, here's a place to find out what intersections to avoid on Labor Day - and the rest of the year, for that matter.

FasTV, which accretes a ton of video from a wide range of news and other sources and cuts it into bite-size, annotated chunks for easy Web viewing, is now running highlights from State Farm Insurance's series on the 10 most dangerous intersections in America.

There are intersections from California and five other states, culled from the insurance company's statistics on auto accidents. For a look at where not to drive, go to www.FasTV.com

FasTV, by the way, is one of a number of sites now putting lots of video on the Net, everything from movie trailers to music performances to news broadcasts. Generally, the companies are betting increasing numbers of high-speed connections will make viewing video a more enjoyable experience.

Disney's Go Network, for instance, has a music-oriented site called Wall of Sound (at www.wallofsound.go.com) that just cut a deal to run music videos provided by Entertainment Boulevard (at www.entertainmentblvd.com). Many of the videos aren't available through the usual sources, such as MTV, VH1 or BET, so it should be a welcome addition for music fans.

And for those who like acquiring their music videos the semi old-fashioned way, Facets Multimedia in Chicago has a catalog of more than 1,000 videotapes, laser discs and DVDs from a wide range of genres.

For more information, e-mail the company at salesfacets.org or call [phone]. The catalog is free.

Ready Freddy?

I'm not quite sure our world needs this, but New Line Home Video is offering a boxed set of DVDs of all seven of its ``Nightmare on Elm Street'' movies to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the durable horror franchise's debut.

The good news is the DVDs are loaded with tons of extras for those who can't quite get enough Freddie Krueger. The series was influential, helping create the modern slasher genre, finance New Line's creation, and kickstart the careers of such notables as Laurence Fishburne, Johnny Depp and Patricia Arquette.

The bad news: It's still Freddy slashing teens in their dreams for seven bloody discs.

Nonetheless, New Line does it right. The DVDs include interviews with all seven movies' directors and actors as well as other horror directors and fans. Win a series of trivia games on the discs, and you'll be entered in a random drawing for merchandise and other DVDs. There's also an encyclopedia and a documentary about the series and a 3-D sequence complete with viewing glasses.

If you're watching this stuff on your PC, you'll be able to watch the film as the screenplay scrolls by, read up-to-date cast and crew bios, and link to the official Web site (to be launched this summer at www.NightmareOnElmStreet.com.

It'll cost you about $130 for this embarrassment of, um, riches. You can also buy the movies individually, and on VHS video, though most of the extra goodies aren't available on tape. I hear some people would kill to own this collection. Or to make me stop making bad jokes.