Toshiba Satellite P50t

Toshiba Satellite P50t: First Impressions

Toshiba aims to impress with a 4K laptop

On the surface the Toshiba Satellite P50t looks like a fairly standard 15.6-inch laptop. It has a large keyboard with a number pad, all the connections you could possibly need and does its best to remain thin and light.

But it has a claim to fame: it will come with the option of a 3840 x 2160 4K / Ultra HD display that's calibrated by display experts ChromaTune and which is Technicolor Color Certified.

This is not a review but first impressions based on a short time with the product. The Toshiba Satellite P50t is expected to go on sale in Spring.

Toshiba Satellite P50t: Screen

Let's deal with that screen to start with. Important point first, it's not the only option. The P50t will also be sold with a more mundane 1920 x 1080 screen, which I'm certain will cost a good deal less than the 4K version. Sadly there's no price for either, yet.

While Toshiba couldn't share all the specs of its 4K screen at the demo I attended, it did claim a peak brightness of 300 nits (about standard for a decent laptop) and a pixels per inch of 282ppi. That's slightly more than the 220ppi of the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, though it's not an especially important difference to my eyes.

What's of greater import is the accuracy and colour range, and we'll just have to wait for a review unit for that. Toshiba makes allusions to a wide-gamut and the ability to switch colour spaces on the fly, though, which is promising. On first inspection it certainly looked impressive, and that's with the addition of touch layer that can impair image quality sometimes

Toshiba Satellite P50t: Design

Despite being a large 15.6-inch laptop, Toshiba claims an impressively light total weight of 2.2kg. This is great and at first glance it doesn't feel like Toshiba has cut too many corners to hit this weight. It's no MacBook, but it has pleasant to touch metal finish and some pleasing curves. I'm less enamoured with the perforated metal speaker grill, but it's not a serious eyesore.

Overall, a great deal rides on the price here. The P50t looks like a nice laptop, but not the kind I'd be willing to spend MacBook money on. If it's cheaper, though, all should be fine.

Toshiba Satellite P50t: Keyboard

The only part of the P50t I wasn't too keen on based on my short with it was the keyboard. The layout is OK, but the action on the keys felt a little shallow and imprecise to me. Granted, I didn't write an essay on it and some may call me fussy about keyboards (I am), but that's because they matter! On first try I wasn't 100 per cent convinced.

Still, it is backlit and the addition of a number pad is welcome one. It may not win style points, but it's a huge practicality thumbs up here.

Other things to consider

All the specs are fairly vague at this stage and there will doubtless be multiple configs, but by the sound of things they'll all be Quad-Core Intel Core i7s with 1TB hard drives. It's disappointing to see no mention of an SSD or hybrid option, however, which could hamper performance in comparison to rivals.

Another interesting choice is the AMD Radeon R9 M265X GPU with 2GB VRAM. We don't see AMD cards in laptops all that often, and with good reason: Nvidia has, in recent times, held a significant performance advantage. We haven't tested a M265X yet, though, so I'll reserve judgement until we do.

Other highlights include 802.11ac Wi-Fi, an SD card slot that supports UHS-II cards and Harmon/kardon speakers. Said speakers have DTS Sound audio enhancement and Slip Stream Technology, but your guess is as good as mine as to what that actually means. Hopefully they'll sound good, but I didn't get the chance to try them at the launch.

Toshiba Satellite P50t: First Impressions

My overriding feeling for the Toshiba Satellite P50t is cautious optimism. The screen looks very promising and the design is nice without being spectacular. If the price is right then Toshiba could be onto a winner, but the price will be key.

Sony MDR-HW700 review

Pros

• Excellent multi-channel movie or game playback
• Amazingly comfortable to wear
• 4K switching supported through HDMI throughput

Cons

• Not as good for music
• Dialogue slighlty dislocated from screen

Review Price £450.00

Compare all prices

Key Features: Wireless headphones; 7.1 and 9.1 playback support; HDMI loopthrough with 3-HDMI switching support; Hi-Res Audio playback; Optical digital audio and line input audio options too

Manufacturer: Sony

Sony MDR-HW700 review

What is the Sony MDR-HW700?

The HW700s are wireless headphones from Sony which, remarkably, claim to deliver a 9.1-channel surround sound effect without all the speakers. These aren't really the kind of headphones you would pair with your smartphone on a morning commute, then, but the kind you'd use at home to enjoy films in 'surround sound' without waking up the wife, the kids, the neighbours, the dog and generally making yourself deeply unpopular.

Sony MDR-HW700: Design and features

It’s obvious as soon as you look at the HW700s that they’ve been designed with comfort in mind. There’s a nice chunky ‘wrap’ of cushioned leather running the full length of the head band, while the plush leather padding for the ear cans is well over an inch thick. 

Focussing on comfort makes sense, of course, given the HW700’s home cinema focus, for you’ll likely be wearing them for a couple of hours at a time. Or much longer if you’re a massive Titanic fan…

The build quality for the can fittings and backs is attractive enough from a distance – especially the textured finish to the closed can rears. But it looks perhaps a touch plasticky if you look closely – albeit very robust, thick plastic!

On the left ear can is the main Power On button, as well as a USB port for attaching to a USB charging device such as a laptop (the headphones are fully rechargeable, as you would expect these days). 

On the bottom edge of the right can, meanwhile, is a quartet of further control buttons. One is a simple volume control wheel, but the others point to the full extent of the HW700’s sophistication/ambition. First there’s a menu button, which calls up an onscreen menu if you’re using the HDMI loopthrough feature of the HW700’s external transmission unit (more on this soon).

Plus there’s an input button – also connected to the functionality of the transmission unit – and an effect button for toggling through a trio of sound processing options.

The transmission unit is vastly more sophisticated than the usual transmission units you get with wireless headphones. Its main point of difference is the presence on its rear of not only an HDMI loopthrough system but a multi-input HDMI loopthrough system. In other words, as well as being able to strip out the digital multichannel audio from an HDMI source the transmitter box can be used as an HDMI switchbox for up to three sources.

Even more startlingly, it can be used as a 4K switchbox! We were at first pretty incredulous at the appearance of Sony’s 4K logo on the HW700’s box, wondering what the hell this ultra high-resolution video platform might have to do with a set of headphones. But feed a 4K source into one of the HDMIs on the HW700 transmitter unit and a 4K source emerges from its output. This is pretty impressive considering that the dedicated HDMI switchbox business is still struggling to handle 4K signal switching.

The HW700’s transmission box also carries an optical digital audio throughput and a stereo audio line input if you don’t want to go the HDMI loopthrough route (though bear in mind if you have that you won’t be able to enjoy the full 7.1 and even 9.1-channel audio potential the headphones claim to deliver), while its front shows you by illuminating different parts of its fascia what input and what sound format you’re using. 

This information text is pretty small, though, which makes it pretty hard to read from a typical TV viewing distance if, as we suspect, you’ve got the transmitter sat somewhere near your TV kit rack. This is where the onscreen menus come in. If you’re using the HDMI loopthrough capability pressing the menu button on the headphones calls up a simple but effective onscreen interface providing such information as what options you currently have selected (number of audio channels, audio format etc) and the remaining battery power in the headsets, while also allowing to you to fine tune such things as centre channel level, low-frequency level, audio delay (if you’re experiencing lip-synch problems), and whether you want the TV audio to play as well as the headphone audio.

In terms of the audio formats the HW700s support, as well as the usual DTS and Dolby Digital multi-channel options (including the HD incarnations) you’d expect of any surround sound equipment, there’s also the key 7.1- and 9.1-channel LPCM support. 

Plus, of course, the HW700s can be used as standard music headphones, with the high-end cans forming part of Sony’s new High-Res Audio drive, meaning they’re capable of parsing – and, hopefully, doing justice to – high-res audio formats like FLAC and DSD. If that interests you then read our review of the High-Res Audio Sony NWZ-F886 MP3 player.

The frequency response range of the HW700s is suitably extreme at any rate, apparently taking in everything from 5Hz-25000kHz.

One final rather neat little feature of the HW700s is the way they automatically turn themselves off to save battery if they detect you’ve taken them off – and then turn back on when they detect you’re wearing them again.

Sony MDR-HW700: Set up

The HW700 is more difficult to set up than most wireless headphones because of the need to wire your HDMI sources through it if you want to maximise its capabilities. Though the pay off in terms of having access to HDMI switching and the HW700’s onscreen menus is considerable.

Without using the HDMIs, set up is hindered by the small readouts on the transmission unit and having to control the system by ‘blindly’ using the buttons on the headphones themselves – especially as the headset turns off if you attempt to remove them for easier access to the buttons.

Sony Alpha A500 review

Sony Alpha A500 In theory the consumer digital SLR market is split between five manufacturers, but in practice it's always been a two horse race. Canon and Nikon control nearly 80 percent of the market between them, with Canon firmly in the lead taking somewhere in the region of 43 percent of unit sales and Nikon trailing slightly on about 35 percent. Until fairly recently the remaining 20 percent was split more or less evenly between Olympus and Pentax, but Panasonic's successful G-series of mirrorless system cameras now accounts for about three percent of sales, while Sony has leapfrogged its way into third place with a growing share of around 11 percent of the market.
This is the result of a well planned and very successful strategy of launching the right models at the right time, frequently trumping the market leaders on vital selling points such as sensor resolution, live monitor view, in camera image stabilisation and more importantly price. Sony has also seen the advantage of fielding a wide and varied range of models at different price points. The Alpha range now consists of eight cameras ranging from the £300 A230 to the £1800 full-frame A900.

Take this new Alpha A500 for example. It's one of a trio of new mid-range Sony Alpha models, sitting in between the more powerful and more expensive A550 and the cheaper but simpler A450. It is competing directly with the Canon EOS 500D (£590 inc. lens) and the Nikon D5000 (£550 inc. lens), but manages to be cheaper than both while offering a tempting range of features and impressive performance figures. It is aimed at the experienced DSLR user who is upgrading from an entry-level model and is looking for more features and versatility.