It’s shaping up to be a good year for fans of high-resolution laptop displays. Apple may have kicked things off when the company started shipping MacBook Pro notebooks with Retina displays, but this year we’ve also seen notebooks from Google and Toshiba with higher-than-full-HD screens.
Now HP is joining the party with the HP Envy TouchSmart 14. It’s an ultrabook with an optional 3200 x 1800 pixel display.
HP will also offer models with 1366 x 768 pixel and 1600 x 900 pixel displays and a starting price of $699 for a model with an Intel processor. I suspect you’ll have to pay a little extra for the highest resolution model.
There’s also a Sleekbook model, which is basically HP’s name for a thin and light notebook featuring an AMD processor instead of an Intel chip.
The HP Pavilion TouchSmart 14 Sleekbook will have a starting price of $480 when it launches on June 5th. Available options include AMD discrete graphics with up to 2GB of dedicated memory and up to 1TB of disk space.
If the TouchSmart name didn’t make it clear, each of these models will also feature touchscreen displays.
via The Verge and The Windows Blog
HP makes some interesting looking PC’s but 20 years ago I had two successive HP printers seize up just past warranty with repair costs greater than a new one and I swore never to buy HP again. Funny how that works. You’d think they might have even anticipated such a consequence.
This looks really good for my linux purposes where the higher the resolution the better.
Maybe I should also upgrade my 5×7 dot matrix printer to a 1200dpi laser printer unless the printing gets too tiny. Just kidding about the printer not about linux.
I am also wandering how well/bad it will support linux. I am looking for an ultrabook so I hope to get positive feedback on linux from the first adopters!
Eww. High DPI under windows is unusable for anything but Metro and a hand full of 3rd Party apps where the app developer actually paid attention to the scaling settings from the OS… These need to come out to kick developers in the pants so they’ll start updating, but bow this is an anti-feature to make me avoid buying anything like this for at least a year or three unless Windows Blue (8.1) really surprises me.
Yeah, ultimately it’s a problem for third-party app developers to solve. Adjusting DPI settings in Windows actually makes most system fonts look just fine — but a huge number of third party apps will look awful.
The same thing kind of happened when Apple started releasing MacBook Pro laptops with Retina displays — some third party apps didn’t look right until developers updated them.
But there are thousands, possibly millions of older Windows apps that might never be updated. So while a rush of high-res notebooks could spur major software makers to start optimizing their Windows apps, if you’ve been relying on older software for the past decade or two, you might find they no longer play well with these new screens.
Do PDF files look better (in Adobe Reader) on this display?
Let’s hope that the amount of RAM will be on par with the number of pixels. 1 TB disc is good. Does it have glossy screen or a more business friendly anti glare display?
I wonder how many recent games I’ll be able to play at 3200×1800 with a passable frame rate. If the Sleekbook comes with a graphics card with 2GB memory, I wonder what kind of graphics will be powering the Ultrabook.