Toshiba Satellite U845: Ultrabooks Go Mainstream

Woe is me. Seriously. I dare someone to ship a worse display. Actually, wait, Samsung already did that with the Series 5, never mind (black levels of 2.501; please shoot me now). And because I’m fed up with writing this over and over again, I’m going to copy the next paragraph from Dustin’s review of the XPS 13.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. AnandTech receives a notebook for review from a vendor not named Sony or Apple (or sometimes ASUS now), and that notebook features a cut rate 1366x768 TN panel with poor viewing angles, poor color, poor contrast, and just poor quality all around.

The U845 specifially has a relatively woeful contrast ratio, somewhat low brightness (not that you ever really need more than 250nits unless you spend a lot of time outdoors), midpack color accuracy, and a very narrow color gamut. I've actually never tested a notebook with a display that covers less than 40% of Adobe's RGB1998 test gamut (in my memory at least— if somebody wants to prove me wrong, I'm all ears). And to make matters worse, the display panel itself is basically chromed out. Toshiba likes to ship super glossy displays for some reason, as you can see in the photo above. I really can't understand why.

Seriously, these are *Ultrabooks*. Even budget Ultrabooks, based on premium name and reputation alone, should have higher quality display panels. The minimum entry price for an Ultrabook with a good display should not be $1000. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few very high quality Ultrabook displays—the Samsung Series 9 Ultras (starting at $1300), the Zenbook Primes (starting at $1050), the Vizio CT15 (starting at $1000), and I guess the HP Envy Spectre 14 ($1399) display is good enough to count here too.

If ASUS can ship an IPS panel with an 850:1 contrast ratio in a $199 tablet, laptop vendors can find it within themselves to put decent panels into their midrange $800 Ultrabooks. And for a company like Toshiba who already has a lot of experience shipping high quality display panels in low cost devices through three generations of tablet devices, it’s quite disappointing to see the lack of emphasis on notebook display quality. Let's hope Windows 8 changes that.