Toshiba Protege R700 / R705 horrible screens?

[MIDIman]

Can anyone confirm the awfulness of these screens as mentioned by anand?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3888/toshiba-portege-r700-a-truly-ultraportable-133/7

According to this site, there's seems to be lots of screen options - or is there an older R700?:
http://www.screentekinc.com/Toshiba__Portege__R700-series-laptops-lcd-screens.shtml

Wondering if he just got a bad test system. IMHO, I think its an incredible laptop and I'm going to get one if the screens are OK.

 

[flensr]

It is not a high gamut screen and it has all of the weaknesses of a TN panel.

I wouldn't call it horrible but it does not calibrate nearly as well as a nice IPS panel I have next to my wife's R700, and of course if you move your head up or down more than a few inches you start to see color and contrast changes.

I agree 100% with Anand though... The R700 is an awesome powerful and thin/light laptop, with a mediocre screen.

If you want a great screen in a small laptop, you're pretty much stuck getting a mac since all the other manufacturers are putting crap panels on their laptops to keep the costs down. Even the premium lines by the big names (including Lenovo's top of the line) have crappy cheap TN panels.

If you need that good of a screen, you're either going to pay a LOT and be stuck with a specific manufacturer regardless of other features you might want, buy a mac, or be stuck using an external monitor. And yes Apple is still using the core 2 duo in their 13" macbooks so there is nothing close to the R700 with regards to features and overall performance, for anywhere close to the same price. Anand is right, this is a really crummy thing the laptop manufacturers are doing, but they need to sell and a laptop priced higher than a similar mac will probably see worse sales numbers than the mac.

 

[MIDIman]

Thanks - I actually am quite partial to many new laptop screens - my first-gen Studio 15's for instance is pretty mediocre as well, but it at least can get overly bright and has good viewing angles allowing me to have at least some control over its quality. When a screen can't even reach a decent brightness though, it becomes useless.

Do you have another laptop screens you can compare it to? Sounds like these are at Best Buy so I might just check it out myself there.

Again, my biggest question is if it can be simply replaced by a better one. I know that screens are generally very specific to a specific laptop, but I've definitely seen exceptions. Meh - probably not worth the trouble and I'll just wait for the next roundup.

 

[flensr]

I've owned a handful of laptops and for general use, the R700 certainly looked usable. Aside from being glossy, it isn't any worse than my T41p screen... Which isn't saying anything, since Anand threw in a T4x screen as a throwback comparison, and every one of the screens out there now blew away the T4x screen from 6 years ago.

If you're going to be doing detailed graphics work, then yea you need a good panel. For general use though, it seemed just fine to me. Plenty bright but I am sure that some overall brightness was sacrificed to help keep the thing thin/light and help with battery consumption. The screen on the R700 is EXTREMELY thin, so thin that until you get used to how thin it is, it feels like it might just tear off like a piece of tinfoil. It will flex quite a bit every time you open and close it, no matter how you hold it. But it's designed to do that, so it's not a big deal and you get used to it after a while.

 

[TrackSmart]

I don't know if this is too late, but I purchased the Toshiba R705 model from Best Buy a week ago. And yes, the screen is quite poor. When I put it next to my (fairly nice) desktop monitor, gosh, the laptop screen looks entirely washed out. Especially when displaying the same desktop image.

All that being said, the screen is *no worse* than every other cheap laptop screen. The quality is similar to the screen on my Acer netbook.

Two things to know about this laptop before buying:
1) The cooling system is designed so that the fan *must* be running at all times and it has a high-pitch that is annoying in a quiet room.
2) The screen is pretty poor compared to the Sony Vaio Z (my wife's work computer) and compared to any of the MacBook laptops.


My Verdict: If you are buying the $750 Best Buy model (2.4 GHz Core i3), then this is an acceptable compromise. If I had spent $1,000+ on this laptop, I would surely have returned it due to the poor screen and the constant hum of the fan. I tried to get a sense of the fan noise before buying it, but the store was so loud that the system was completely inaudible. In a quiet room, however, you will hear that hum.

You really can't get much more for your money at the $750 price, given the lightweight and built in optical drive. That's the pricepoint where this model shines. But I wouldn't recommend paying any more for it than that!

Can anyone confirm the awfulness of these screens as mentioned by anand?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3888/toshiba-portege-r700-a-truly-ultraportable-133/7

According to this site, there's seems to be lots of screen options - or is there an older R700?:
http://www.screentekinc.com/Toshiba__Portege__R700-series-laptops-lcd-screens.shtml

Wondering if he just got a bad test system. IMHO, I think its an incredible laptop and I'm going to get one if the screens are OK.

 

[TrackSmart]

FYI the Toshiba R705 is now down to $699 at Best Buy. That makes an already good deal even better. Though mind the cons from the Anandtech article, because it's only a good deal if you can live it