Over this year, one of the biggest obstacles to buying a high-definition TV crumbled into dust. Even if you’re looking for a big, flat-panel plasma or a liquid-crystal display screen, you no longer have to spend more than the cost of a good laptop computer.
For years, you couldn’t go wrong by letting one number drive your digital-camera shopping: the megapixels, or millions of picture elements, that the camera could record in an image.
Computers are made and marketed as all-purpose machines, but for a lot of people they have a rather limited job description: Web browsing, e-mail, MP3s, digital photos, the occasional letter . . .
Why is it that shopping for a technology gift can seem harder than picking out a college or finding a house to buy? I blame the numbers and the acronyms.
