It is a pleasure to congratulate cable channels, film studios and network television on their closed captioning. Some broadcasters, producers and networks seem to take pride in what they show on the air or sell in stores, including their captioning. TURNER BROADCASTING Of the major cable channels, all those in the Turner Broadcasting family are doing an exceptional job with closed captioning. Turner Classic Movies specializes in old films which were not originally captioned. Turner has captioned a great proportion of their vast film library, including shorts, documentaries and specialty one-reelers. Not only do they caption their programming, they list which shows have captions in both their printed program guide, their e-mail and online guides. More importantly, their captioning is generally of good quality, with a majority of the work done by the National Captioning Institute. However, nearly all captioning is done with uppercase characters only, reserving mixed case (both lower and upper case letters) for music and sound effects notation. Numerous classic films are not captioned verbatim, with odd omissions. In the film When in Rome, for instance, the captioner even summarized a direct quote from The Book of Common Prayer, surely irritating many Catholic viewers. Many classic films have dialogue that is famous or at least well-known, and summary captioning of these films loses much of the flavor of the original. As verbatim captioning seems to be the preferred method for most programming, it's a shame that so many great films have indifferent closed captions. In Random Harvest, Ronald Coleman's character gives his wife (Greer Garson) a fabulous bracelet. She loves him and was married to him during a 3-year period when he had amnesia, though he doesn't remember it. Their current marriage is one of convenience, and so she says "Thank you for the wonderful present," with a slight sardonic edge on "wonderful." The caption reads only "Thank you for the present," negating the point of the whole scene. However, captioning on all the Turner networks is remarkably error-free, something few other cable channels seem to manage. NETWORK TELEVISION The three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, are all broadcasting their newer shows with excellent captioning. Most programs have mixed case captions--by far the easiest to read--and are verbatim. Captions are located appropriately on the screen, placed to indicate who is speaking and raised to allow important identifying 'supers' and show credits to be visible. Real-time captions on news programs are an art in and of themselves and are not addressed on this website, as reviewing them would not serve any purpose. Most live programming is reasonably well-captioned, especially considering how incredibly difficult it is to do well. NEW FILMS ON DVD The captions on DVDs are excellent, as the captioner can have access to the script and thus get all the character names spelled right and any oddities of speech accurately. Most new releases have traditional Line 21 closed captions with music and sound effects notations, as well as English subtitles without the music and effects. The latter are usually easier to read as there is far more flexibility in use of fonts, color, placement and appearance.