What to avoid in the gadget jungle ; For cellphones, cameras and TVs, watch out for features you won't need

SAM GROBART
International Herald Tribune
05-12-2011
What to avoid in the gadget jungle ; For cellphones, cameras and TVs, watch out for features you won't need
Byline: SAM GROBART
Type: News

The reality is that most of us are usually dealing with a finite amount of money to spend, and that means making trade-offs.

Buying gadgets can sometimes be like buying a car; it requires sorting through options. Do you go for the navigation package or the rear-seat entertainment system? The faster processor or more memory?
The easy answer is "both." But the reality is that most of us are usually dealing with a finite amount of money to spend, and that means making trade-offs. We want to get the most bang for our buck, not to be lured into paying for features and options that are not worth the money.

Below is some guidance about what is worth paying for, and what can be left unchecked on the options list.

PAY FOR MEMORY, NOT SPEED When buying and configuring a new computer, companies often give the option of upgrading the processor and adding more memory, or RAM. If it is an either/or proposition, go for the RAM. Processors are usually fast enough for most people; it is the RAM that can be the bottleneck.

Here's a side note on RAM: Do not buy it from your manufacturer. RAM purchased from online retailers is just as good and considerably less expensive. Check out retailers like Crucial for Windows machines and Smalldog for Macs. Each will tell you what kind of RAM you need for your machine, and they often sell it for more than half off the manufacturer's retail price.

PAY FOR TEXT MESSAGING, NOT MINUTES Admittedly, this advice applies best to a certain type of cellphone user who has a Monday- to-Friday, 9-to-5 office job. If this describes you, you are probably not using your cellphone much on weekdays. That leaves you with nights and weekends, when minutes are free on many U.S. plans. Look at your last bill and see how many minutes you used. You may be surprised to find that you are using fewer minutes than you are paying for.

And what cellphone carriers charge for text messages is ridiculous. If you have no bundled plan, each text sent or received can cost you as much as 20 cents. For an extra $5 or $10 a month, you can get hundreds or even thousands of texts included in your package. It is a far better price than going a la carte.

PAY FOR COMPONENTS, NOT CABLES Buy the finest displays, speakers and components you can afford for your media center. Be dazzled by a crisp, bright display. Feel as if you are in the middle of the action with the most powerful surround-sound systems. But when a salesperson starts pushing the A/V cables for $1,000 (this price is not an exaggeration; such cables exist at this price), walk away.

Many connections today, like HDMI or optical audio, are digital, which means there is little to no signal degradation along the length of the cable. Small exceptions can be made if you are connecting components across long distances. Even with analog connections, it is highly likely that you will not be able to hear the difference between an inexpensive cable and an expensive one.

PAY FOR SENSOR SIZE, NOT MEGAPIXELS David Pogue, who writes the State of the Art column for The Times, has made this a rallying cry for years. But it bears repeating because the industry still promotes one now-useless specification and obfuscates a far more important one. Almost all cameras have enough megapixels now; it is the size of the image sensor that largely determines the quality of an image. Sensor size is confusing, because manufacturers use different formats. In response to a blog post from Mr. Pogue, someone created Sensor-Size, a Web site that converts sensor measurements for an easy comparison.

PAY FOR SPEED, NOT PREMIUM CHANNELS Most cable operators offer tiers of Internet service, usually a broadband version of coach, business class and first class. The top tier is usually more than most people will ever need, but the base package may groan under the weight of heavy video streaming. Better to move up a tier, which should add about $10 to your monthly bill.

That way, you can cancel most of your movie channels and go with services like Netflix, Hulu Plus or Amazon Instant. Their costs are considerably less -- either pay-per-video or less than $10 a month - - than what you pay for Cinemax, TMC, Starz, Encore and other movie channels. You may want to keep HBO or Showtime if you like those channels' original programming, because those shows will probably not be available anywhere else.

If you have a recent TV or Blu-ray player, you may already have access to Netflix and the other providers as built-in "widgets" that will connect through your home's Internet connection. If not, $99 in the United States will get you a Roku box or an Apple TV, which will do the same thing. Over the course of a year, the cost of the hardware and services will be far less than the monthly fees you were paying the cable company.

PAY FOR APPLECARE, NOT MOBILEME Apparently, Apple makes some products that people really like. But MobileMe, the company's suite of cloud-based services, does not have same draw. Maybe it is because most of what MobileMe can do is available free from other companies. Web e-mail? Gmail. Photo storage? Flickr. Cloud storage? Dropbox. There used to be one killer app on MobileMe -- Find My iPhone. But now that is available free to all iPhone users, so that is one less reason to pay $99 a year for the service.

But saving on MobileMe frees up some cash for something more valuable, and that is AppleCare, Apple's extended hardware coverage and phone support. If you buy an Apple product without AppleCare, you get 90 days of free phone support and one year of hardware coverage, except that accidents like spills, drops and other mishaps are never covered; only malfunctioning equipment is. If something goes wrong after that, you must pay for any phone support or repair work, and the prices are high -- from $30 to $50. But purchase AppleCare, which costs from $29 for an Apple TV to $349 for larger MacBook Pros, and you get three years of phone support and repair coverage.

While other tech companies offer similar plans, most are to be avoided, as calling them for help often results in "did you try restarting your computer?" Apple's technicians are helpful and persistent and, since the company makes both the operating system and the hardware, they have the added benefit of actually knowing what they are talking about.

PAY FOR SIZE, NOT REFRESH RATE As Matt Buchanan pointed out in a post on the technology blog Gizmodo a year and a half ago, every television manufacturer has a sweet spot when it comes to price and size. Going to 50 inches from 42, Mr. Buchanan explains, may cost you $200, but going to 54 inches from 50 could cost $400 more, so 50 inches is where you would get the most for your dollar. Every manufacturer has its own sweet spot, so it pays to look at the lineup and see where it is.

But one thing you do not have to spend much time looking up is a television's refresh rate, measured in hertz. That tells you how many times per second the TV refreshes the image on its display. A 60-hertz television refreshes its image 60 times a second; 120- hertz does it 120 times a second. Many -- if not most -- TVs now have a refresh rate of 120 hertz, and more expensive models are faster than that, refreshing the image 240 times per second. And while twice as fast is theoretically better, your eyes would be hard pressed to tell the difference.

Copyright International Herald Tribune May 12, 2011