As a child, did you ever have the urge to scribble on your TV screen? As an adult, have you ever wanted to mark up the screen during a slide presentation? Now you can, thanks to the new SMART Board for Plasma Displays ($3,300 to $5,000 street) from SMART Technologies. With models designed for 42-, 50-, 60-, and 61-inch plasma displays, SMART lets you transform conference-room presentations into interactive and archivable meetings.

Most intelligent whiteboard solutions for displays rely on resistive analog touch-screen overlays or radio-frequency transmitters and sensors to capture participants' marker strokes. SMART Technologies' breakthrough approach places four CMOS cameras in the corners of the board's bezel to triangulate the pen's position.

This Digital Vision Touch (DViT) technology has a number of advantages. There is no need for power in the marker stylus, so there are no batteries to replace. In fact, you can use your finger to draw on the screen or control the mouse. The hard, protective sheet placed in front of the plasma display does not reduce the image brightness, as some touch technologies do; in fact, its anti-glare properties actually enhance image quality in many settings.

Drawing on the screen has a natural feel, thanks to the soft tip on each stylus and the matte finish of the overlay. The SMART Board includes an intelligent tray for the four styluses and the eraser; it can sense which one was removed last and activates the software to use that color.

Just as impressive is the included application software, which complements the board perfectly. It is easy to control Windows applications or make annotations on the screen. If you have to enter information into a program, you can use an on-screen keyboard or the handwriting-recognition feature. (These work well, but a real keyboard is still much faster.)

You can then capture the screen's contents, including the annotations. There is also a whiteboard program that lets you capture multiple pages of notes, as if using a newsprint pad. The captured images can be printed or distributed electronically.

The SMART Board for Plasma Displays is not cheap: It costs as much as some plasma panels. But it transforms the display into a truly interactive tool that can make meetings and demonstrations more effective and productive.