Review: Toshiba Satellite P50t-B - a laptop with a 4K display

ULTRA-high definition is shedding its image as a niche technology.

THERE’S now plenty of TVs on offer that play ultra-high-definition video — known as 4K or UHD — with four times the resolution of 1080p high-definition displays. There’s also UHD computer monitors made by the likes of Sharp, Dell and Asus.

It’s therefore predictable that UHD screens are finding their way on to laptops, and fitting that Toshiba is among the first to market them. Last year it produced a fine 2K Windows 8 ultrabook called the Kira (Sanskrit for “beam of light”), with a 2560x1440 resolution display. They sold for between $1799 and $2199.

The Japanese manufacturer now has gone the full monty with the premium model of its Satellite P50t-B, a Windows 8.1 touchscreen laptop with full 3840x2160 UHD resolution. So you can play whatever UHD quality clips you scrounge at the same resolution as on a bigger and more expensive 4K TV. I say “scrounge” as all UHD devices suffer from a lack of movie and mainstream video content — now.

I tested the display by playing the same 4K time-lapse clips I used for testing the Kira a year ago — of Toronto, honey bees, Dubai’s New Year fireworks, Barcelona and Myanmar. They looked great but it was deja-vu. The major problem remains the lack of content.

The only other means of enjoying UHD is to make your own; and that’s possible with a growing list of UHD cameras and even smartphones that purport to shoot it.

Ultra-high definition isn’t as immersive on a laptop as on a large home-theatre TV but it’s incredibly sharp and impressive nonetheless. Colours on the 15.6-inch UHD wide-screen display are true and lifelike.

The Harman Kardon in-built speaker that runs underneath the grill below the display delivers fantastic sound.

I found that if the file sound quality is not so good, the sound is a bit muffled.

The laptop’s Intel Core i7 4700HQ quad core processor (rated 2.40 gigahertz), Radeon HD 8800M graphics from rival AMD together with up to 16 gigabytes of internal memory make for smooth playback. It’s a powerful configuration but by no means the most powerful. On Cinebench 11.5, the CPU rated 6.93 while the OpenGL graphics test returned only 27.08 frames per second.

The Satellite P50t-B is a totally different style of computer from the Kira.

While the Kira purports to be an ultrabook, this model is a desktop replacement-style laptop. It’s big enough to have a fully sized backlit keyboard complete with separate ­numeric pad, and at 2.35kg heavy enough to be uncomfortable to hold in one hand. I managed to carry it around in a backpack, but that’s as portable as things get. It also has a largish charger that takes up significant space in the said pack.

The fact it isn’t designed for ­on-the-go is reflected in battery life. Playing video on the Satellite chomped up a full battery charge in 163 minutes.

But no one can quibble about the build quality, or the array of connections on the P50t-B. It has a classy silver brushed-aluminium lid and chassis with 4 USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, full HDMI out and separate microphone and headphone jacks.

It easily played UHD video from a connected USB3.0 portable hard drive.

It also has a card reader you can miss as it’s hidden underneath the keyboard at the front, right-side.

The laptop has fast 802.11ac WiFi, a 1 terabyte standard hard drive (mine had 916 gigabytes of free space), and a Blu-ray player. Of course, if you’re going to eventually play 4K movies, you’ll need a multi-layered Blu-ray player, but the industry is yet to settle on a standard for them — even though the technology to produce them has been available for yonks.

It isn’t rocket science. You can in fact buy BDXL multi-layered Blu-ray disk burners on eBay. They typically have capacity of 100GB for three layers or 128GB for four. Even larger capacities are possible. Pioneer five years ago floated the feasibility of a 20-layer optical drive with a 500GB capacity.

Given the availability of the technology and the keenness of 4K device manufacturers to produce multi-layered Blu-ray disks, the stumbling block seems to be the film studios and their reticence to see their prized content distributed in 4K splendour.

For the foreseeable future, you’ll be consuming whatever UHD movies become available from a connected portable drive. As we’ve already indicated, the Satellite P50t-B has no problem delivering on that.

When we reviewed the Kira last year, we complained that the big resolution screen had the unfortunate side effect of rendering text on Windows 8 microscopic to the point of being unreadable. That wasn’t such a problem this time around, with text in Internet Explorer and Chrome readable, as were Word documents.

The P50t-B is one of three new satellite P50 models but is the only one to feature a UHD ­display.