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If you're looking for a cheap TV 42 inches or larger, there are a lot of advantages to buying a plasma instead of an LCD.

The biggest is picture quality: an LCD is typically not able to reproduce the black levels and contrast of an equivalently priced plasma, and plasma always trounces LCD for viewing angle and uniformity. Entry-level 720p plasmas are also more energy-efficient than more expensive 1080p plasmas, and while they use a lot more power than LCDs, they still only cost about $20 to $30 per year to run.

We recently reviewed a bunch of entry- and midlevel plasma TVs, and our favorites are collected below. There were a few that didn't make the cut, including the LG PA6500 and PA4500 as well as the Panasonic X5. The latter was a surprise as every other plasma in the Panasonic range is superb for the price, and the X5 is simply...well...poor. Its picture quality was very disappointing even for the money, especially compared with that of our new budget star, the Samsung E450.… Read more

A while back I told you about Keepsy, a Web site (at the time) that allowed you to use your Facebook and Instagram photos to create a personalized calendar. Fast-forward to today and Keepsy has released an iPhone app, allowing its users to create Sets of photos, which can then be turned into physical photo books.

To make a pocket book, as it's referred to by Keepsy, you'll need to download and install the free Keepsy app from the App Store. Create a Keepsy account or log in to your current account and then begin creating a Set … Read more

ACDSee 15 is a full-featured photo editor and manager optimized for home and business users. It shares many features and capabilities with ACD's pro photography applications, including powerful image editing tools that can handle the tasks you need as well as gigabytes of online storage space that you can use to organize and safely store tons of images. You can access your account anywhere, and from any computer or related ACD tool, by simply logging in. But ACDSee 15 is also specifically geared to make it easy to post and share your photos online, create slideshows and CDs, add … Read more

Picture Collage Maker Lite for Mac is a free, nicely designed, easy-to-use photo collage maker for creating greetings cards, collages, or scrapbooks for special moments, and it has 150 great templates. Unfortunately, almost all of them are locked, despite the fact that the promotional material talks about more than 100 being available, which is annoying.

Although the design resembles other applications available on the market, such as CollageIt for Mac, Picture Collage Maker doesn't just copy its competitors. At first launch, users will be asked to choose a template from the long list of those available, but this is … Read more

Alleged mock-ups of Apple's iPad Mini emerged today, courtesy of French Web site Nowhereelse.fr.

The photos show a mock-up of the iPad Mini, with a white front, held in various angles. Another photo shows the cases of the larger and smaller iPad stacked with an iPhone 4S and what appears to be the case for the longer iPhone 5.

The photos, which Nowhereelse.fr spotted from Chinese site Dgtle.com, are apparently intended to showcase iPad Mini accessories. It's unclear whether these mock-ups represent the actual iPad Mini, and Apple has declined to comment to CNET.

The … Read more

It's easy to click away with your digital camera or phone and save tons of snapshots to your PC. If you've ever admired someone else's immaculately trimmed and framed digital pictures, there's no reason yours can't look the same; all you need is software that can create borders and frames for your images. But a tool that's too difficult to use is almost worse than no tool at all, especially if you spend a lot of time learning to use it but end up no further than when you started. Not all picture framing … Read more

Do you spend more time with a computer, smartphone, or tablet than your significant other? Your life serves as the elementary premise for a futuristic love story, "Her," in which the film's star, Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with an interactive operating system.

The movie, directed by Spike Jonze and made in collaboration with Annapurna Pictures, also stars it girls Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, and Olivia Wilde. … Read more

TestDisk and PhotoRec from CG Security are freeware utilities bundled together in one portable download. TestDisk is a simple but powerful tool for analyzing and recovering disk partitions, including some unusual selections such as Xbox and Mac partitions. PhotoRec is designed to recover lost files from your digital camera's memory or any similar memory device. It can handle most memory types, including USB, CompactFlash, MMC, and SmartMedia as well as optical disks and your hard drives. Though PhotoRec and TestDisk are bundled, they're separate utilities with separate executables.

PhotoRec is designed to be totally safe to use, and … Read more

This year the gap between the picture quality of the best LED/LCD TVs and the best plasma TVs has grown wider than ever. Unless you're interested in overspending for buying a Sharp Elite, there's no 2012 LED TV that can come close to the picture quality of even midlevel plasmas like the Panasonic TC-PST50 and Samsung PNE6500.

But maybe you're simply not interested in plasma. If that's the case, then check out the following list of 2012 TVs that (A) employ an LCD panel illuminated by LEDs and (B) perform better than most such TVs. The list doesn't include the Elite and the Sony XBR-HX929 simply because they debuted in 2011; both are excellent performers, still current and exceedingly expensive. It also considers picture quality only, so if you're interested in seeing the best LED TVs overall, including some that scored well according to our other TV reviews criteria, here ya go.

The list appears in descending order of picture quality.… Read more