Internet-enabled TVs: Fast track to the Web

As you peruse the latest TV ads, you might notice phrases like “Internet enabled” or “Yahoo widgets,” or even more-cryptic names like Samsung Media@2.0 and Panasonic Viera Cast, and wonder what it's all about.

In a word: connectivity. Over the past year, TV makers including Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, and LG have started building Ethernet ports into their TV so you can view online content on the TV screen, using your remote control to navigate. All you need is an Internet connection, generally wired, but in some cases wireless. You don’t have to use a computer or any external device.

Your TV can only access specific online content, so don’t expect to browse freely around the Web. When this capability first arrived, about a year ago, all you could get was pretty basic stuff, like RSS feeds with news, stock updates, and weather info. But now you can get to YouTube, eBay, photo sites such as Flickr, and—possibly the killer app—movie services such as Netflix, Amazon on Demand, Blockbuster OnDemand, and Vudu. Content varies by brand and even by model. In our TV Ratings (available to subscribers), we note the level of access each set provides on the detailed model page.

Many of the TVs we’ve seen use Yahoo’s "TV Widgets"—small, colorful onscreen icons--to accomplish this. As Yahoo explains: Press one button on your remote to bring up the TV Widget Dock, select a TV Widget, and view content. With each TV Widget you can also create a Snippet or shortcut for quick access to the content you want. By pressing a button on your remote, you can connect directly to your friends' photos on Flickr.

We’re trying out sets from the various TV brands to see how their offerings and usability compare and will be reporting on the experience soon. —Eileen McCooey

Tech Talk: Optical zoom beats digital zoom hands down

Although it's not as common as it used to be, you'll still come across the occasional camera ad listing two types of zoom: optical and digital. We just saw a press release for the recently released Pentax Optio E80 mentioning optical zoom and something called "intelligent zoom." Besides the optical 3X zoom lens it has "the Intelligent Zoom function, which...can extend the zoom range to approximately 17.1 times." To the untrained eye, the last sentence may give you the impression that you are buying a superzoom, with a 17.1x zoom lens. You're not. (This is just a random example. Other camera companies do exactly the same thing.)

In our view, optical zoom is the only type to consider when buying a camera. It maintains image quality by relying on the lens itself to magnify details. Digital zoom, which is sometimes referred to as extended zoom (or in this case, intelligent zoom), magnifies an image by electronically enlarging just a portion of it. In some cases, the camera itself must fill in missing details, which almost always degrades the image. If your camera has digital zoom, we suggest turning it off and using just the optical zoom.

On most point-and-shoots, optical zoom ranges between 3x and 10x, although some newer superzoom models have as much as 26x. In many ways, how much zoom you need also depends upon they type of photos you take. For example, if you do a lot of shooting from a distance, say from the sidelines of your kid's soccer game or the middle of the school auditorium, you may want to opt for a superzoom, a camera that has at least a 10x optical zoom lens.

Our Ratings (available to subscribers) tell you which cameras have the greatest overall optical zoom. —Terry Sullivan

Netbook? Laptop? What's the difference?

We've been writing about “netbooks” for a while now, and you might be wondering if that's just another term for a laptop. Yes and no. They're both portable computers, but they're by no means interchangeable.

In a nutshell, netbooks are smaller, lighter, and cheaper, and they're designed for occasional use rather than as a full-fledged computer. Here's how these kissing cousins compare:

How Netbooks and Laptops Stack Up

	Netbooks	Laptops
Price range	$300 to $450	$400 to $2,800
Weight	2 to 3 pounds	3 to 8 pounds
Battery life	2.25 to 9 hours	2.25 to 7 hours
Hard drive size	8 to 160 GB	160 to 320 or more GB
Screen size	9 to 12 inches	12 to 18 inches

The most important thing to remember is that netbooks are much less powerful than laptops, and in most cases you wouldn't want a netbook to serve as your primary computer. Ergonomics is another consideration. If you’re planning to do a lot of typing, the smaller keyboards on most netbooks might be a nuisance.

That said, a netbook is a good option if you need a system you can easily carry around, so you can log onto the Internet whenever you want (whether over free Wi-Fi or your own wireless network, or via a paid data plan).

You can see what we thought about specific models in our latest Ratings of laptops and netbooks (both available to subscribers). For more help in deciding which portable computer is right for you, watch our free Laptop Buying Guide video and check out our Computer Buying Guide for more computer shopping tips. —Donna Tapellini

DTV coupons: It’s now or never

On Friday, July 31, when the clock chimes midnight, the DTV coupon program will no longer accept new applications, so act fast if you haven’t already asked Uncle Sam to kick in $40 toward the purchase of a digital converter box.

Applications sent via snail mail must be postmarked no later than July 31, 2009, and online, phone, and fax applications must be made by 12 midnight Eastern Time. You should expect your coupon (one or two per household) via first-class mail about nine business days after your application is received. You’ll then have 90 days to use the coupon before it expires.

To order a coupon, you can call the toll-free, 24-hour automated system 1-888-DTV-2009 (1-888-388-2009). You can download an application and mail it to PO BOX 2000, Portland, OR 97208-2000, or fax it to 1-877-DTV-4ME2 (1-877-388-4632). Remember, you have to do it within the next 24 hours or so.

Apollo 11: Reflecting on how far we’ve come technologically

Google Moon gives users a chance to view the Sea of Tranquility with-out the week long trip. [Image: Screengrab]

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 space landing, an event that achieved the simplest of impossible missions: perform a manned lunar landing. And among the wonders of the day, and the entire mission—when viewed from a 2009 perspective—is the relative modesty of the tools and technology that NASA had to work with, specifically, the main computer carried aboard the Apollo 11 capsule.

According to FlightGlobal (“Serious About Aviation”), the Apollo Guidance Computer, or AGC, had just 64KB of memory and only 0.043 MHz of processing power. That was enormous at the time, of course, but compare those specs with those of modern netbooks—the pint-sized laptops that are considered underpowered by today’s computing standards.

The typical netbook has over 100 GB of capacity – more than a million times that of the computer on which NASA staked an historic mission and the lives of three astronauts. And a netbook’s 1.6GHz processor is several thousand times faster than that of 1969’s AGC.

On the ground, the mission depended on a host of mainframe computers, including a number of IBM System 360/Model 75. Each of these IBMs occupied an entire large room (as shown in the photos) and cost at least $2 million.

Viewing angle still the Achilles heel for most LCD TVs

LCD TVs are known to have problems with viewing angle, something to remember when you go to make that television purchase.

Many of the LCD and plasma TVs in our latest Ratings (available to subscribers) do an excellent job displaying high-definition images in all their splendor. But with the LCD sets, you might not always see the top-notch picture quality we describe, because most of them have a stingy viewing angle.

While viewing angle plays a small part in the overall score in our Ratings, the picture quality scores are based on the ideal viewing position--smack in front of the screen. As soon as you stray from dead center, either off to the side or up or down, the screen on most LCD sets starts to look dim or washed out, and the colors shift. In extreme cases, the picture can become almost unwatchable. On some models, the horizontal viewing angle is the bigger problem, while on others it’s the vertical position.

Every single LCD TV in the Ratings suffered from this to some extent, so none earned an excellent score for viewing angle. In fact, more than half the LCD sets we tested had only a fair or good viewing angle—two or three steps below the excellent score earned by every plasma set tested. And it’s not just small, low-priced LCDs that fall short. One of the best, and priciest, big-screen models in our test group had fabulous picture quality, but the viewing angle was so narrow it could seriously impede your ability to enjoy that quality in normal use.

The problem is glaringly obvious to us, because we have a few dozen LCD and plasma TVs set up in the lab, side by side, at any given point in time. As we walk around the room, the picture quality on the LCD sets keeps changing, and we have to stand directly in front of the screens to see optimal quality. The plasma TVs show the same rich colors and deep blacks from any angle.

Gesture control: Is it the next big thing?

Microsoft's new gesture controller for the Xbox 360 premiered this month at E3. (flickr:Jake of 8bitjoystick.com)

More devices are being equipped with what’s technically known as  “perceptual user interface,” or PUI -- the capacity to recognize and respond to mere human gestures. Some recent examples are the recent unveiling of motion and gesture controlled gaming devices by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.

Do those announcements, and others -- like the Canesta system that lets you control your television or DVR with the wave of your hand  -- presage an imminent wave of, well, waving, pointing, and other gesturing to operate the gear in our homes?

Maybe not, according to a panel on new user interfaces at a Consumer Electronics Association conference last week. The panel spent more time talking about other ways to interact.

Like haptics: the technology where a surface interfaces with a user through the sense of touch. It’s already available on some touch screens in the form of vibration feedback. Certain Samsung phones, such as the Memoir and Impression , for example, offer vibration feedback to help you locate the keys on its virtual keyboard, and know when you are depressing them. There is also voice recognition, a recent addition to the upcoming iPhone 3.0 operating system, which the panel agreed, could unleash a host of third-party apps using voice controls.

The challenge with gesture control, as one panelist put it, is that we don’t have any universal body language for a lot of the actions we’d want gesture control to accomplish. For example, there’s no widely shared gesture that means “turn it off,” so programmers would need to invent one, and then hope users would be willing to learn it.

Tech Talk: Monitor resolution (and why it matters less than you'd think)

When you shop for a computer monitor, you probably notice the display’s resolution, such as 1024x768, prominently listed. But this spec actually matters little to your buying decision, once you’ve settled on the size of monitor you want.

Here’s why:

The listed numbers represent the monitor’s maximum or "native" resolution—the number of pixels that can be displayed horizontally (the first number) and vertically (the second number) on the screen. Pixels are the screen elements that render detail; the more of them in every inch of screen, the more detail should be apparent—at least all other things being equal.

The number of pixels monitors have tends to rise in step with size, and be fairly uniform within sizes, too. So, today’s widescreen (16 x 10-aspect) monitors typically have a maximum resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels in the 19-inch size; 1680 x 1050 pixels in the 22-inch size, and 1920 x 1200 pixels in the 24-inch size.

Tech Talk: THX certification

If you've gone through our TV Ratings (available to subscribers), you may have noticed that a number of plasma TVs and LCD TVs now list THX certification as one of their features—and it's something that we'll typically call out when we discuss the TV. But what does it really mean?

First off, the THX company was started in the early 1980s by Star Wars director George Lucas, who believed that many movie theaters were delivering sub-par audio and visual experience to their audiences. So THX was created to develop specifications to ensure audiences a consistent level of performance when they viewed his—and others'—films.

Since then, THX certifications have moved out of theaters and into homes, and even cars. TVs, receivers, amplifiers, preamplifiers and speakers that bear the THX logo have been tested by THX and certified to meet certain performance benchmarks.

Tech Talk: ISO setting

As summer approaches, you may find yourself shooting in many different lighting scenarios, including low light. For example, you might be photographing an evening party where there just isn’t that much available light. One solution is to turn on your flash. But if you don’t want to do that, you might opt for increasing the camera’s ISO setting. If you’re not familiar with the term ISO, here’s some help:

ISO stands for International Standards Organization, the association that developed this specification for film many years ago. As with film, an ISO setting measures how sensitive a camera is to light.

A lower number, 100 or 200 ISO, means that the camera is less sensitive to light than at 1600 or 3200 ISO. When the lighting is less than ideal, using a higher ISO setting gives you more flexibility in adjusting other exposure settings (such as aperture or shutter speed) to capture a well-exposed photo or freeze action. It also lets you avoid having to use your camera’s built-in flash.