Top-rated reviews of the week

CNET - Here's our weekly roundup of the new products CNET reviewers liked best.

Barnes & Noble Nook Touch Reader (Wi-Fi)
Editors' rating: 4 out of 5

The good: The 2011 Nook is a compact and lightweight e-book reader with a responsive high-contrast Pearl e-ink touch screen that offers quick page turns. It's got built-in Wi-Fi for direct access to the online Barnes & Noble store, an expansion slot for additional memory, and long battery life (up to two months). The Nook supports e-book lending and EPUB loans from libraries, and it offers some enhanced social-networking features.

The bad: The 2011 Nook has no support for audio, no 3G option, and no Web browser. The rubberized finish on the back of device attracts fingerprints.

The bottom line: The new touch-screen Nook is a major advancement over its predecessor and offers some real advantages over the current Kindle.

Read CNET's full review
Prices start at $139

Panasonic TC-P55VT30
Editors' rating: 4 out of 5

The good: The Panasonic TC-PVT30 has outstanding overall picture quality, with superior black-level performance, very good shadow detail and accurate color points in THX mode. It can handle 1080p/24 sources and bright rooms well and exhibits the nearly perfect screen uniformity of plasma, as well as very good 3D picture quality. It includes one pair of 3D glasses and a Wi-Fi dongle. Its Internet suite is simple to use yet content-rich, and its styling is understated and classy with a single-pane design.

The bad: The VT30 is very expensive, and last year's Panasonic plasmas lost black-level performance over relatively short periods of time. Its color is not as good as the best current plasmas and it uses significantly more power than LCD TVs.

The bottom line: Superb all-around picture quality, anchored by the deepest plasma black levels of the year, make the Panasonic TC-PVT30 series the best-performing TV we've tested in 2011.

Read CNET's full review
Prices start at $2,599

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