Toshiba Australia who are looking to pick up market share after the exit of Sony and Samsung from the PC is set to launch an Ultra HD laptop which also comes with Harman Kardon speakers, the Japanese Company who witnessed a slump in consumer PC sales last year is also teaming up with headphone brand Skull Candy in an effort to get their brand to appeal to a younger audience.
Pricing or availability in Australia has not been announced but in the USA the new 4K notebook which comes with a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and up to 16GB RAM, an AMD Radeon R9 M265X discrete graphics card with 2GB RAM, and a 1TB hard drive will go on sale next week from $1,499.
In Australia Toshiba notebooks have been retailed at a premium to what the same notebooks are sold for in the USA.
Newegg who recently launched an Australian web site selling Toshiba notebooks at up to 35% cheaper than the likes of Harvey Norman and Bing Lee.
The big difference with the new P55t is the notebooks screen resolution which is 3840 X 2160 with 282 pixels per inch. This is significantly below the 4K 4096 X 2160 resolution display screen of a TV or what Hollywood shoot 4K content at.
The new notebook has Windows 8.1, four USB 3.0 ports, backlit keyboard, SD card slot, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and HDMI out.
The Company is also set to announce a new budget Satellite series
Toshiba claims that the flagship Satellite P55t was “designed to take on the most intensive computing demands and display unprecedented imagery,” the company said.
“We’re very realistic about who’s buying this [4K Ultra HD] product,” said Carrie Cowan Toshiba digital products division product manager. “We see a definite place for 4K in the notebook market simply because there is a growing number of photo enthusiasts out there and video content creators who can really benefit from this screen resolution. It’s a different play than it is on the TV side.”
The display includes In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology for wide viewing angles, installed Chroma Tune calibration software, and Technicolor UHD Certification for natural colour expression and accurate colour gamut.
The Satellite P55t includes a full version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 software.
Other features include Toshiba’s Sleep & Music feature that allows using the laptop’s speakers even with the PC turned off.
Design characteristics include an edge-to-edge LCD glass look, a frameless LED-backlit keyboard, large clickpad and a brushed-aluminium finish.
PC Magazine in the USA wrote do consumers want 4K on their laptop? 4K may be a great idea for cinematic screens at the movie theatre, and I can even get behind 4K on some of the larger televisions. But shoving more pixels into a small display that is already densely packed at 1080p? Colour me sceptical.
