scanning

Not to be outdone by HP's recent touch-screen printer, the folks at Lexmark just debuted their line of Web-connected touch-screen all-in-ones.

The big difference between the two is that although they both have touch technology, the HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web is meant to live in the home, while the three printers featuring Lexmark's MyTouch technology are designed to increase productivity for the business market. Nevertheless, this won't stop us from putting them side-by-side in the first ever Web-connected, touch-screen-printing kumite.

Only three out of the eight new products include a large 4.3-inch touch screen, … Read more

This program scans and locates duplicate files on your computer. It's easy to use and navigate; however, we found its search capabilities too limited.

Duplicate File Remover's interface isn't flashy, but it is easy to use and navigate. Simply open the application and select which folder(s) on your computer that you want to search, and the search will begin. When the search is finished, a summary of all found duplicate files is displayed. From there, you have the option of deleting, copying, moving, or hard-linking the files. For our tests, we knew we had some duplicate … Read more

The official Google Books blog has a fun post on how to scan your books into the service's "My Books" feature by using a USB barcode scanner. The My Books section of Google Books is similar to the popular Mac application Delicious Library in letting you keep a list of all your titles in a digital card catalog that can be shared with others. Of course you can do this without the USB barcode scanner simply by searching for the book, but Google's Matt Cutts makes it look like fun:

As Cutts mentions in the video, … Read more

Thanks to this spyware removal program's lack of a Help file and vague interface, it is difficult to imagine a less appealing utility than Spyware Vaccine.

This freeware installs easily and doesn't infect your computer with anything, but that is about all we can say in its favor. On launching, the application goes straight to the system tray. Once we realized that nothing was happening, we double-clicked on the small bottle icon, and were presented with a larger bottle icon that contained a link to Scan and a link to the maker's Web site. Clicking Scan opened … Read more

At CES this year, LG made a big deal out of its 240Hz technology, claiming it bested similar blur-busting tech from other LCD makers. The LH55 series represents the company's least-expensive HDTV equipped with a 240Hz refresh rate, and when it comes to that feature, as usual, we weren't particularly impressed. The results were similar to those seen on other 240Hz displays--reduced blur that was difficult for us to really discern, although test patterns prove it's there--but we were a bit annoyed that you have to engage the smoothing effect of dejudder if you want to reduce … Read more

CardStar is a free app that's designed to help you thin out your wallet or key chain, by replacing all of your discount, reward, and membership cards with bar codes. CardStar requires some work up front, as you have to enter your identification numbers by hand for each card. The app currently supports more than 130 companies, from popular grocery and drug stores to gyms, airlines, and libraries. You can also use the app's "advanced" mode to enter cards for companies that aren't listed.

The developers behind CardStar say that the app works better with … Read more

Updated May 29 at 11:25 a.m. PDT with more details, quotes throughout.

Gumblar, a new attack that compromises Web sites, has added new domain names that are downloading malware onto unsuspecting computers, stealing FTP credentials to compromise more sites, and tampering with Web traffic, a security firm said on Thursday.

The Gumblar attack started in March with Web sites being compromised and attack code hidden on them. The malware downloaded onto those sites came from the gumblar.cn domain, a Chinese domain associated with Russian and Latvian IP addresses that were delivering code from servers in the U.… Read more

Every year it seems there's a new catchy spec in the HDTV realm everybody likes to talk about. A few years back it was 1080p resolution. Then we heard about 120Hz, which is supposed to reduce motion blur in fast-moving images on LCD TVs. Well, this year, the latest and greatest spec is 240Hz, which is supposed to do what 120Hz does, but better.

Not too long ago, our video guru David Katzmaier gave his initial impressions on 240Hz in a post titled "Is 240Hz worth waiting for?" When he wrote that piece, he'd just seen his first 240Hz TV in action and wasn't sold on the new technology. Now that he's reviewed four 240Hz HDTVs and has a fifth review (the LG 47LH55) in the works, he's still not sold, but he admits the verdict isn't totally clear-cut.

Part of the problem is that there's a difference between what your eye sees in everyday material you watch and objective testing done with test patterns. As Katzmaier notes in his post, "Standard LCD and plasma TVs refresh the screen 60 times per second, or 60Hz, which is plenty fast enough to eliminate flicker and create the illusion of motion from a series of still images. In fact, most sources sent to your display arrive at the nominal rate of 30 frames per second, and each frame is repeated once by the television to achieve 60 total fps."

For most people, including me and Mr. Katzmaier, it's very difficult to see the impact that "faster" LCD sets have on picture quality. We spent some time in our AV lab watching various source material from 120Hz TVs and 240Hz models and it's really hard to detect any difference (it's hard to detect any difference between 120Hz and 60Hz models, too). To be clear, I'm referring here to motion-blur reduction because of faster refresh rates, not to dejudder processing, which smooths out motion and makes film-based material shot at 24fps look more video-like. When dejudder is engaged, you can easily spot its impact on the picture. (It's also worth mentioning that the dejudder processing on the 240Hz TVs we tested so far wasn't any better--or worse--than than the dejudder on 120Hz TVs). … Read more

As LCD and plasma vie for popularity and picture-quality bragging rights, one perceived weakness of the LCD camp has provided a reason for TV makers to charge more for step-up models: image blurring. Higher refresh rates like 120Hz and now 240Hz aim to clean up blurring with newfangled technology, and Toshiba's ZV650U series is one of the least expensive of such sets available.

Unlike such sets by Samsung and Sony, the Toshiba ZV650U uses a scanning backlight to reduce blurring--and, in fact, the company is careful to call its technology a "240Hz effect" to differentiate it from … Read more