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A stylish laptop that can play high-definition movies
Sony’s Vaio FW31ZJ entertainment notebook has a 16:9 aspect screen, full HD support, and a built-in Blu-ray drive.
The stylish magnesium chassis is finished in silver with a mesh grille above the keyboard housing the speakers and media centre control buttons; this is matched by the mesh-like finish to the touchpad. However, at 3.2kg it’s at the higher limit of what you’d want to lug around.
Powering the FW31ZJ is an Intel Core 2 Duo T9550 which zips along at 2.66GHz, supported by 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory, more than enough to keep the 64-bit version of Vista Home Premium happy and give the FW31ZJ very reasonable performance. It scored 3,985 in the demanding PCmark Vantage, which is pretty respectable for a notebook.
The 16.4in X-black panel screen has a native resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels so it supports full HD, and has an aspect ratio of 16:9, which is ideal for watching movies via the built-in Blu-ray burner. The screen does reflect lighting a little but it’s nowhere near as bad as some we have seen. Colour reproduction and contrast are first rate. There’s also an HDMI port to connect to an external HD screen.
Powering the graphics is an ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650 with 512MB of dedicated GDDR3 memory. Even so, it struggles with the latest games; using World in Conflict’s built-in benchmark at 1,024x768, it only averaged 13fps, with all the in-game details set to maximum. Reducing these and lowering the resolution may increase the frame rate, but it will still be a struggle.
There’s a 500GB 4,200rpm hard drive, a Memory Stick reader and an SD card slot. Battery life is good for something that will be plugged into the mains most of the time; just less than two hours for watching a DVD, and two and a half hours for normal use.
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Pros: Good feature set; very good screen; Blu-ray drive
Cons: It’s pricey
Overall: Sony’s FW31ZJ is a very good, if pricey, full HD entertainment notebook
with an excellent screen
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2 months old now
I've had my VAIO FW31ZJ for 2 months now and it's a cracking laptop. I was going to get a Dell but they insist on using the flawed nForce 8x00 series graphics chipset. I must admit I had higher expectation for the ATi HD3650, but that's cos I have a 1Gb GDDR5 HD4870 in my desktop! The build quality is excellent...it has a blu ray writer, a 500gb hd, 4Gb RAM...infact, the *ONLY* thing i am disappointed with is the fact it has Vista on...such a let down as it zaps an otherwise really good laptop...I'm going to get a second HD and put XP on it. If the drivers work, I'll use that permanently. If you can afford it, you'll not be disappointed with the hardware. The keyboard is a dream to use, the touchpad works flawlessly, the screen is just awesome! It has 1Gbps LAN, a modem (Who uses them any more?), 3x USB, 1x HDMI, 1x VGA, IEEE1394 Firewire (Sony's iLink), lots of pointless memory stick ports etc... Overall - Excellent, but pricey. Build quality - awesome. cons- Damn vista just sucks the power. performance comparison: Distributed.Net can rach 20,000,000 keys a sec on this CPU (2.66Ghz Dual Core). For reference, an AMD Athlon64 6400+ black edition desktop CPU can do 28,000,000 keys a sec (3.2Ghz Dual Core).
Posted by Peter Lewis, 01 May 2009