By: KDKA-TV News Staff

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Duquesne Light says it wants to raise its rates.

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The company made that request to the Public Utility Commission on Friday.

Under its proposed plan, the average home would pay an additional $7.73 per month.

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An average commercial customer would pay around $55 more per month.

According to Duquesne Light, the company has not raised its base rate since 2018, and says it needs more money for critical infrastructure adjustments.

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If the Public Utility Commission approves the rate increases, they would take effect in January next year.

Xiaomi’s Mi 11 is one of the lightest and most compact smartphones to offer top specifications like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset, dynamic 120Hz screen and dual speakers tuned by Harman Kardon, together with a bunch of effects for video recording to make your videos more fun.

After using “large” phones for many years, it is nice to hold a “light” phone again. The phone’s design, apart from the camera, reminds me of my old Samsung S7 Edge with a curved glass sandwich with metal rims all around the sides. However, the ones on the left and right are narrower than the top and bottom. There is nothing wrong with this design, apart from the downside of having a significantly curved screen, which I find causes mistypes and accidental touches during horizontal use, like gaming. The good thing though is that you can easily adjust how much you want the phone to ignore touches on the edges of the screen to fit your liking.

Another downside of being light and thin is that there is less space in the cooling system, which rears its ugly head when you push the phone for more than just casual surfing. The phone heats up to an uncomfortable level to hold but does not overload nor freeze when gaming or during long sessions of recording videos or snapping photos. It is a sacrifice to get something this powerful in a compact form, I guess.

With enough light, the phone produces eye-pleasing sharp, vibrant photos and slightly oversaturated videos with its wide selection of lenses. The phone has optical stabilisation on its 108MP wide-angle camera which is a must for people with shaky hands. However, in low-light situations, it is not as good as its competitors which can make dim-environment photos look like daytime. You can also get up close to a subject, like flower petals, with its tele-macro lenses. So, apart from taking pictures of soi dogs in a dark alley, this phone will give you great results. In fact, you can even do cool video tricks like freezing a person in time while another moves normally, or make the background move while the person in the frame remains relatively still.

The hole punch front-facing camera is located at the top left corner of the screen, which I find is the least obtrusive area to put one. Samsung tends to place these in the top middle which is a little more noticeable. However, these punch holes and notches tend to “disappear” after a few days of use because you get used to them and your mind simply ignores them over time. You can ask any iPhone user about their “huge” phone notches and they will reply with “I don’t mind” or “I don’t see it anymore”.

Compared to Samsung phones, the Mi 11 has virtually no bloatware apart from the typical uninstallable social media apps, giving the phone more space out of the box to take more photos and install apps that you want. On the other hand, there are very few extra useful features, like the Samsung DeX, or being able to take photos by showing the palm of your hand, for instance.

There is a rare feature that comes with this phone — an infrared blaster (IR blaster). This feature lets you use the phone as a remote control for any electronic device that can be controlled by one, like a TV or an air conditioner. If you are the kind of person who can never find your aircon remote, this feature will be a major boon.

It’s funny that the most expensive phones give you less in the box, but the cheaper ones give you more, no? The Mi 11 gives you a 55W adapter, a transparent case, and a USB-to-headphone-jack adapter, while the iPhones and the high-end Samsungs do not.

I also love the cartoonish transition animations when you move from app to app or go back to the home screen, which is amazingly fast and zippy. But this may be an acquired taste because it can be considered a little childish to some. Not to me though, I find it smooth, stylish and refreshing.

This phone can also do video upsampling to make not-so-smooth videos smoother using AI. Cool but not necessary with what YouTube and Netflix give you these days.

The phone has a 4,600mAh battery which has outstanding standby time. Once, I left the phone at the office for three days and when I got back, it still had around 20% battery left. On Samsung phones I have tested, they normally run out of juice in less than two days on standby. The phone has a 55W wired and 50W wireless charging speed, which is about two-to-three times faster than what Apple or Samsung give you currently.

The phone’s reverse wireless power share lets you charge other wireless charging capable devices by placing them on the back.

The phone picks up 5G signals very well, better than Samsung’s top phone even.

The matte backplate surprisingly attracts a lot of fingerprint smudges. I was expecting the matte texture to prevent most smudges like the Samsung S21 Ultra. But, no, I still need to have my microfibre cloth ready for it several times a day.

Xiaomi has come on in leaps and bounds in establishing their own shops in several department stores, but they are no Samsung or Apple that have plenty of their own stores and service centres, and opt to distribute this phone through COM7 stores (which owns many gadget stores like Banana and Studio7) instead. At least, if anything goes wrong with the phone during its lifespan, you can always find a place relatively easy and ask for help, unlike smaller brands like OnePlus that only have MBK Center.

If you want 95% of what current top phones have while paying 30% less, this is the phone for you.

Specs

• Screen 120Hz 6.81-inch Corning Gorilla Glass Victus AMOLED
• Body 164.3mm x 74.6mm x 8.06mm, 196g (glass)
• Chipset Snapdragon 888
• RAM 8GB (LPDDR5)
• Storage 128GB (UFS 3.1)
• Cameras 108MP wide-angle camera with OIS, 13MP ultra-wide-angle camera, 5MP tele-macro rear), 20MP (front)
• Connectivity Dual 5G SIM, Wi-Fi 6, NFC, IR blaster, USB Type-C, reverse wireless charging
• Battery 4,600mAh
• OS Android 11 with MIUI 12.0.3 on top
• Price 21,900 baht

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is coming in May with a beefy selection of graphical enhancements, including support for 4K, HDR, and ultrawide displays, unlocked framerates, and improved models, lighting, shaders and VFX. On Twitter yesterday, project director Mac Walters confirmed that players will have a proper opportunity to enjoy all that sweet new eye candy, revealing that the Legendary Edition will have a photo mode.

Simplistically, a photo mode is just a way to take screenshots without a lot of dicking around, but many of them are very sophisticated tools that go way beyond a simple capture. Control’s photo mode supports adjustable field of view, focal distance, aperture settings, and multiple filters, for instance, while Cyberpunk 2077’s goes even further, enabling users to pose characters and adjust their facial settings.

There’s almost no end to what can be done with them: Some users capture stunningly dramatic images (even from mundane games like American Truck Simulator), while others use them to discover whether Norma Reedus really whips out the peedus in Death Stranding. (FYI: He does not .)

It remains to be seen how elaborate Mass Effect: Legendary Edition’s photo mode will be, although the gloomy greyscale Garrus image shared by Walters points to adjustable focal length, aperture settings, filters, character controls, and other features. Technical design director Brenon Holmes added on Twitter that photo mode will be accessible through the mission computer, “so anytime you can pause the game,” and that it will be available on all three games, and all platforms .

Here are a few more images of the photo mode in action, courtesy of the Mass Effect Twitter feed. They’re very pretty:

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition comes out on May 14. Along with the upgraded visual effects, it will also feature some significant changes to gameplay .

Anyone paying attention to 2021’s new Samsung TVs will notice that there’s some new terminology being thrown around: Neo QLED.

Yes, there are enough acronyms in the TV market already, and you may feel exasperated at having to constantly learn new words and terms. However, Neo QLED does mark a significant change in Samsung’s TV technology, and if you want to keep abreast of the latest and greatest televisions, you’ll want to get your head around it.

It’s not the same thing as QLED, which has been Samsung’s premium TV technology for the past few years.

So what is Neo QLED, what marks it out from regular QLED, and what TVs does it apply to? Here’s what you need to know.

• What is QLED?

What is Neo QLED?

Neo QLED is an evolution of Samsung’s existing QLED technology, which stands for ‘quantum dot LED’. That’s because QLED TVs use a ‘quantum dot’ filter to increase contrast and color vibrancy.

Samsung has made sure its premium televisions all use QLED technology since 2017, when it rebranded its SUHD (Super UHD) range, at least partially to invite comparison with the ‘ OLED ’ televisions that now hold sway over the market.

The impact of a QLED panel varies depending on a variety of factors, though, including but not limited to the processor being used, as well as the efficacy of the backlight behind the panel.

Lower-end QLED TVs make do with an edge-lighting system that – as the name suggests – lights up the panel from two sides, rather than directly behind it. This allows the TV to stay somewhat slim, but means that the light is spread inconsistently across the screen, and won’t make for the best picture.

High-end QLED TVs will use a Direct Full Array backlight, which shines light through the panel from behind, and will offer more precise brightness control and consistency (therefore allowing better contrast between light and dark parts of the screen, crucial for effective HDR highlights and general picture excellence).

Even these TVs vary in quality of backlight, though, depending on the peak brightness available (1,000 nits, 2,000 nits, etc) and the number of ‘dimmable zones’ that can vary in their level of brightness. More zones means more control over small and specific areas of the screen, so you want as many as technically possible.

Neo QLED changes things up a little. The direct array is replaced by a Mini LED backlight, using tens of thousands of tiny LEDs for vastly more precise brightness control. It’s not quite on the level of OLED, with its individual pixel control, but it’s certainly a step up for LCD screens.

What difference does this make?

If it’s deployed effectively, Mini LED backlighting should allow LCD panels to get much closer to OLED levels of performance than has been possible before. These theoretical advantages are pretty compelling.

And, of course, that’s without OLED’s perceived problems: LED/LCD technology has never been the subject of screen-burn scare stories, nor does it fall prey to the eventual but inevitable drop-off in performance that’s the price of the ‘organic’ element of OLED.

Of course, the success of Mini LED will come down to the way the technology is implemented. There’s a lot of variation in the performance of similarly priced, similarly specified LED-backlit LCD screens – you only have to have a quick glance at our numerous TV reviews to see that. And if some TVs are found wanting when it comes to controlling a few dozen backlight dimming zones, can they really be expected to be any better when they have control of what could be thousands?

Read more: What is Mini LED?

What Neo QLED TVs are there?

2021 will be the first year we see Neo QLED TVs enter the market. All of Samsung’s new 8K TVs will be Neo QLED, continuing Samsung’s tradition of piling together the most advanced TV specifications at the top of its range.

That means the QN900 8K QLED , QN800 8K QLED , and QN700 8K QLED all feature Mini LED backlights.

The QN95A , QN90A and QN85A are all Neo QLED 4K TVs too; the easiest way to tell is that the product name starts with ‘QN’ rather than just ‘Q’, as with the Q80A that sits just below those other 4K sets.

How much does Neo QLED cost?

The cheapest Neo QLED, the QN85A, starts at $1,299 (around £900 / AU$1,650) for a 55-inch size, but the largest 85-inch size of the QN900 8K QLED will cost you a whopping $8,999 (around £6,500 / AU$11,700). So that’s the price range for this year’s Neo QLED TVs.

What other Mini LED TVs are there?

Samsung isn’t the only TV maker pushing Mini LED technology, though. LG is also introducing a ‘ QNED ’ range that uses Mini LED backlights, while Philips is doing the same with some of its high-end LCD sets. TCL has been one of Mini LED’s biggest cheerleaders too – but you can get more information on each manufacturer’s TV ranges from the links below.

• LG TV 2021 : every QNED set coming this year
• Philips TV 2021 : every Mini LED TV on its way
• TCL TV 2021 : every new TCL TV