Sony VAIO F-Series With 3D

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Good audio, if you enable Dolby enhancements
Beautiful display with excellent 3D support

Cons

Overall unit is quite subfusc
Pioneer Blu-ray drive is very noisy

Our Finding of fact

Sony includes Nvidia's 3D Vision with its latest 16-inch laptop, but IT's more attuned to stereoscopic movies than to games.

If you deal just about of Sony's VAIO laptop computer lines, information technology's easily to glucinium impressed with the company's design chops. E.g., who wouldn't ilk the S-series, with its very thin, elegant design?

The VAIO F-series, however, has as unattractive a physical design as I've seen in a pole-handled time. The reveal and the body shell are opposite sizes, and when closed, the whole laptop computer seems to have an underbite. The VGA port bulges out the remaining side, A if it were an afterthought. And the way the top and bottom are beveled makes the 2 parts look back as though they are poorly matched.

Once you get past the unnatural out, however, you'll find much more to suchlike. The display is bright and renders colours with level-headed fidelity. High-definition motion picture content and photographs look gorgeous if you're sitting in the sweet spot; off-axis viewing angles are predictably poor, simply that's a common shortcoming of laptop LCD panels. The video display supports the 120Hz freshen rate necessary for 3D binocular vision support, and Sony bundles Corel WinDVD with full patronize for 3D Blu-ray.

I checked out several 3D Blu-irradiate discs, including a Disney demonstration disc and IMax's Deep Overseas 3D, and wholly of them worked very fountainhead. The LCD shutter glasses that Sony includes with the unit are a cut above the stock Nvidia 3D Vision glasses, and they fit over regular glasses a bit better.

When I fired up the on-board speakers with music for the number 1 clock, I almost shut the organisation down. The default sound quality was ugly–simultaneously loud, harsh, and tinny hearable. Digging into the VAIO control panel, however, I detected the Ray M. Dolby Home Theater logo, with a checkbox adjacent to it. Enabling that feature well improved our test unit's audio lineament, departure Maine to wonder why Sony doesn't enable it by default. Even with Dolby HT enabled, the sound isn't especially accurate, only at least it's fairly tasteful–and information technology does get reasonably yelled.

The keyboard is a delight to use, with soundly tactile feedback and excellent spatial arrangement 'tween the Chiclet-style keys. The cursor keys are on the small side, notwithstandin. The trackpad is placed off-centered (but centred relative to the blank bar) and is super rival-sensitive. Mouse clicks, then again, sometimes didn't register even after several button pushes. Using a portable mouse with this unit is probably a not bad idea.

The VAIO F-Series offers a couple of intriguing features that we couldn't test. You rear end use the VAIO arsenic a keyboard for the PlayStation 3, victimization the included PS3 joining computer software. Other software bundled with the system includes Norton Internet Security (60-day trial), Evernote, and Microsoft Office Starter, plus added Sony utilities.

The VAIO F-Series laptop that we tested enclosed 6GB of RAM plus an Intel Core i7 2630QM Central processing unit. In our PC WorldBench 6 examination, the unit was slightly slower than other laptops equipped with the same CPU; this Crataegus laevigata be due in part to the slightly sluggish Toshiba hard get. Game performance was about the same equally for the Digital Storm XM15, which isn't surprising, since some carry the same Nvidia GeForce GT 540M mobile GPU. Unfortunately, you must dial down the organization's resolution and item settings with current generation DX10/11 bet on titles in purchase order to obtain bankable frame rates. And while the unit in theory can run games in stereoscopic 3D, you'll have to crank the resolution down to 720p–and sacrifice close to detail settings–if you hope to dress any stereoscopic gambling.

As configured, our laptop computer be just low-level $1900, which is fairly pricey for what we got. Whole, the VAIO F-Series appears to be a solid multimedia PC with limited gaming chops and a crisp display that is perfectly capable of display dispatch stereoscopic 3D movies. But the beauty is entirely under the hood: If you don't mind the unsightly exterior and are fain to pay the Sony exchange premiu, the F-Serial publication is worth a nearer look.