AVADirect's Clevo X7200 Redux: AMD 6970M CF Takes the Crown
by Dustin Sklavos on June 2, 2011 3:05 AM ESTAn Improved Screen
Maybe Clevo uses a panel lottery, or maybe they've just slightly updated the X7200, but either way our review unit has a different panel than the last one. It's an improvement in some areas, but unfortunately it's worse in others.
First, the bad new: the new panel doesn't have anywhere near the contrast ratio as its predecessor. Jarred tends to rate that as the most important metric, at least until you reach 500:1 contrast, but in some cases raw brightness can win out. That brings us to the good aspects: the new panel is brighter overall and has substantially improved color accuracy with a gamut that almost perfectly matches the sRGB color space.
The previous unit used a HannStar panel, but our current review unit has an LG panel. There's a slightly bluish cast to the image, but generally speaking it goes with our conventional wisdom: if you want a quality notebook screen, go 1080p. Thus far we've only seen one that's been less than impressive, with the rest being of reasonable quality. Anyone looking for a mobile workstation with a good screen can at least consider the X7200. HP's DreamColor and Dell's RGB-LED panels are still the best laptop LCDs we've seen (and the Lenovo ThinkPad's upgraded panel would be similar), but most of the 17.3" 1080p panels are pretty good.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
44 Comments
View All Comments
jackpro - Sunday, June 5, 2011 - link
It would be nice to know if the screen is aAS-IPS, cPVA, H-IPS, IPS, MVA, P-IPS, P-MVA, PVA, S-IPS, S-PVA, TN
as it would really help with understanding the colour accuracy possible.
like this excellent site does
http://pricespy.co.nz/category.php?k=393
JarredWalton - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
If you know anything about laptops, you should also be aware that 99% of them are TN panels. HP's DreamColor upgrade is IPS (S-IPS I think, but maybe some other variant). Lenovo has IPS on a couple options. I don't believe anything else is currently using IPS on a laptop/notebook, though several tablets are going that route (iPad 1/2 and ASUS tablets).dmichelstexas - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
Showing my ignorance of some hardware situations here so please allow me to apologize in advance if this is as dumb a question as I'm afraid it might be, but is it feasible to replace the reportedly poor keyboard on this machine with something better? Is that even an option, and if so what are the options? ThanksJarredWalton - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
Not that I'm aware of; Clevo makes alternative keyboards that you could use, but the layouts are for different languages (i.e. German or Asian keyboards are options I think). To get a proper layout with a regular numkey area, you'd need to custom build your own, and I'm not quite sure how one would go about doing that.