HP Stream 11 Review: A New Take On Low Cost Computing
by Brett Howse on December 17, 2014 8:00 AM ESTDisplay
The rise of smartphones and tablets has dramatically changed the display landscape, with practically all tablets having In Plane Switching (IPS) displays. IPS offers much better viewing angles and color reproduction compared to the standard laptop displays that use a Twisted Nematic (TN) based LCD. There has been the start of a push to IPS panels on notebooks, but far too many are still burdened with TN. The lower the cost of the device, the higher the probability it will have a TN panel - Chromebooks included. The HP Stream is one of the lowest priced notebooks available and as such, it is saddled with a TN LCD, and not a very good one at that. But, with the price point it has achieved, we must set our sights a bit lower.
With a resolution of 1366x768, the HP Stream 11 has the standard “HD” resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio of almost all notebooks under $500, and once again with this price we should not be shocked or outraged. Compromises must happen to reach lower prices, and the display is almost always one of the first to go. With the 11.6” diagonal dimension, this display comes in at 135 pixels per inch, which is actually higher than the standard 96 DPI Windows was founded on. It is not high DPI by any means, but it is what is expected at this price point.
With a fairly low resolution, there is no need for any sort of strange pixel arrangement, and as such we have a standard RGB stripe. The display has a matte finish, which causes some subpixel distortion.
To evaluate our displays, we utilize a custom workflow in SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 software. To measure brightness and black levels, an i1Display Pro from X-Rite is used, and for color testing the X-Rite i1Pro spectrophotometer is leveraged.
The HP Stream 11 is not a very bright display, but at 220 nits it is fine for indoor use. The matte finish would help somewhat for outdoor viewing, but would still make for a poor experience. High black levels result in a very poor 356:1 contrast ratio, which is further hampered by the poor viewing angles of the TN TFT.
As you can see in the image, the blues in this display are ridiculously high, and the reds drop to nothing. This gives an absurd uncalibrated white point of 18363, when it should be as close to 6504 as possible. The grayscale accuracy is also far too high at 11.6.
When we perform our testing, we are targeting sRGB which is the standard color space for most web content. The HP Stream is not even close to the entire sRGB space, and the amount of drift on our saturation sweeps is very severe. The 100% blue and 100% red are both closer to the 80% mark than the 80% is, which makes the magenta very shifted and compressed. The overall score of 12.01 is very poor.
The colorchecker only confirms the bad news, with an overall score of 10.5. This panel is really poor. Not much more can be said. Calibration also did nothing for the display. It is difficult to calibrate a display to a particular color space when it cannot do the entire gamut. To have a standard, we calibrate to sRGB at 200 nits, and while the Stream 11 is bright enough for this, the LEDs are at practically maximum brightness which likely makes these results even worse.
We have been spoiled by an influx of high quality displays on devices lately. The HP Stream 11 does not continue this trend. It has a TN LCD which is quite terrible, and harkens back to the days of old. At the same time, some leeway should be given due to the price point of the laptop. Clearly HP had a $199 price point in mind and had to find savings to hit that price, and the LCD is always one of the first things on the chopping block. Still, this is even a poor display by poor display standards.
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kgh00007 - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
I bought an Acer Aspire E 11.6 for a family member and I thinkit's basically the same platform. Celeron N2840 and 32Gb Hynix HBG4e. Overall I am impressed with how snappy the system is.The only problem is the Acer only has 9GB free, that's after uninstalling most of the bloatware. There is a separate 10GB recovery partition that Disk Management reports as being 100% free space, that cannot be deleted. Even after creating a recovery drive, there is no option to delete the recovery partition.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to recover that 10GB? It looks like Acer's implementation of WIM boot is flawed. I've found quite a few people complaining of this in the Acer forums, but no solution.
Brett Howse - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
When you have WIMBoot you can't remove the recovery partition because that's where the actual system files are. The flaw I see with WIMBoot (this is the first device I have reviewed which used it) are that they put too much stuff in the recovery partition - free trials to software, office, etc - and they all take up a lot of space. Since you can't remove the recovery partition it would be much better if they made it as lean as possible but depending on the OEM, it might be pretty large, negating the usefulness of it.The HP Stream was 7.2 GB because I'm pretty sure it has the full Office files in the WIM as well. Just make it a download... I'd rather download it once if I need it than take the space hit on something with such a small amount of storage. This version was the MS Signature edition though so it has less of the bloat than most, and yet it is still 7.2 GB. The Windows install I can download is ~4 GB so clearly they could do a better job with either the WIM compression or keeping extra software out and allow you to move that to a recovery USB.
kgh00007 - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
Cheers Brett, on the Acer the recovery partition is 10GB, but when you make a recovery drive it only uses around 7GB, so it looks like they didn't even try to optimise the size of the recovery partition, just went with 10GB!And the windows installation takes up 10GB on the drive, so there's only 9GB user accessible space left out of the box, it just seems like they wasted a lot of space.
On the stream does it actually have 17.5GB user accessible space free on the drive out of the box? The stream isn't available in Canada yet, but I might return the Acer's, I bought two of them for our mothers! They don't need a lot of space, but 9GB is cutting it fine I reckon!!
kgh00007 - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
UPDATE: I returned the two Acer Aspire E 11.6's for a HP Stream 11 and a Stream 13.They just came in to the local Microsoft store, so I got the signature editions and they both have 17.5GB user accessible right out of the box, much better than the 9GB in the Aceer.
Cheers Brett for the info, you helped me to make a more informed decision.
Brett Howse - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
Let me know what you think of them once you use them for a bit. Tweet me @BrettHowseI got this one from the MS Store in Canada so I was going to say yes you can buy them there :) Bit of a price premium over the US store but the CAD dollar has kind of tanked due to oil prices.
The 13" with touch is not yet available in Canada looks like maybe end of January for that one but you just never know.
Squinoogle - Sunday, December 28, 2014 - link
RE: Wifi - you're looking at the Envy range before you'll get anything better than 2.4GHz only 1:1 N (and even then there are still some holdouts), so I don't see them including anything better any time soon.RE: Display - Yuck, I really hope you just got a dodgy example there.
Lerianis - Tuesday, December 30, 2014 - link
I've honest got to say "Boo hiss!" to these because they are expensive compared to the E5-571-5552 from Acer. Bigger screen, more hard drive space, more RAM, more powerful CPU (Core i5) for only twice the cost of this machine.Who are you trying to fool with these articles? These machines are craptacular for what you are getting. Not even worthy 90 dollars in the real world.
avfreebird - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Do you mean that when I have 200$, I (magically) get more 200$ to get a laptop for browsing, officeediting, film watching instead of this "craptacular maschine"?Pstenney - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
My son is having problems using flash player. Flash came preinstalled when we purchased it new Dec. 2015. Using it for school and some classes require flash. Keeps telling us that you must have flash but will not let us.