Gadgets: New TV technology makes for vivid colors

Choosing a new TV is all about how it looks to you. So take a little time and do some comparison viewing.

Consider the Samsung QLED TV. Its 55-inch Class Q7C Curved QLED 4K TV, used with a soundbar, has among the best video displays around. The QLED technology is a worthy competitor to OLED.

QLED stands for Quantum Dot Light Emitting Diode. The advantage to this technology is that the TVs are capable of emitting brighter and more diverse colors. These early QLED sets apparently don't have the contrast of OLED, but they are cheaper to make and the picture is terrific.

The Q7C's gently curved jet black screen reaches to within a quarter inch of the edge of the panel. Of course the design of the screen means there are no visible speakers. The TV's built-in speakers sound fine, but there is a reason Samsung recommends a soundbar.

The TV has one single bracket at the center for support, instead of some others with legs on either ends, allowing for a smaller surface to hold it.

The remote and the playback and channel controls in general need a bit of work. But if you download the free Samsung SmartView app on your phone, it makes it much easier to use the controls.

The TV's interface is called SmartHub, which allows you to see all your connected sources (like OTA, U-Verse, Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV) along with built-in streaming apps (like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) in one place. SmartHub is one of the easiest interfaces around.

Now that hard-drive capacity is measured in billions of bytes, compressing files to save space seems unnecessary. But in 1991, when WinZip was born, it was badly needed. Now, it seems needed more often than not when someone else compresses a file to send through e-mail. The latest version of WinZip for the Mac will compress and even encrypt just about any kind of file — word processing, iOS, Android, MP3 and even files many of us have never heard of. Music files can be compressed without losing quality when the files are unzipped. And it will help users back up zipped files to the cloud. All this makes a geek smile.