They still vary greatly in quality and (accordingly) price.I have several chinese/english dictionaries installed through Pleco (on my phone). With a couple exceptions, they're not free.
When I was taking a formal class in Mandarin, some classmates complained, "the definitions you're getting from Pleco are so much better than ours! What are you doing differently?" They lost interest when I responded "I paid for the better dictionaries".
Different dictionaries have different strengths. CC-CEDICT has entries for standard Chinese versions of western names, and for slang. Then again, it doesn't even have usage examples. ABC has many, many entries, including stuff like technical terms in linguistics. Tuttle Learners' has very few entries (it's a learners' dictionary!), but it does nice things like provide antonyms and, where it might be helpful, character-by-character glosses. Tuttle has my favorite entry for 糟糕 [a mess/very bad/bad luck], headed by "[modif: 糟 messy + 糕 cake]".
When I was taking a formal class in Mandarin, some classmates complained, "the definitions you're getting from Pleco are so much better than ours! What are you doing differently?" They lost interest when I responded "I paid for the better dictionaries".
Different dictionaries have different strengths. CC-CEDICT has entries for standard Chinese versions of western names, and for slang. Then again, it doesn't even have usage examples. ABC has many, many entries, including stuff like technical terms in linguistics. Tuttle Learners' has very few entries (it's a learners' dictionary!), but it does nice things like provide antonyms and, where it might be helpful, character-by-character glosses. Tuttle has my favorite entry for 糟糕 [a mess/very bad/bad luck], headed by "[modif: 糟 messy + 糕 cake]".