Sony's Pretty, Pricey Picture

The Blu-Ray equipped Vaio laptop delivers stunning video, but only early adopters won't gulp at the cost

by Arik Hesseldahl

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Gorgeous video. Blu-Ray burner. Huge hard drive

The Bad: High price. Feeble battery

The Bottom Line: Great for those willing to pay through the nose

Reader Reviews

The imminent war over the next generation of DVD technology is going to be fought on many fronts, and at least one of them is going to be the notebook PC.

Sony (SNE) this week released the first of its Vaio notebook PCs to contain a Blu-Ray DVD player, the $3,500 Vaio AR Premium. I've been playing with it this week and have a few observations.

First let's get to the Blu-Ray disc. The video quality is gorgeous. Sony (SNE) furnished a copy of a Blu-Ray disc with the movie Hitch, and while I can't say much about the content of the film, the video looked great, with lots of detail within the shot. The movie has several overhead shots of New York City that looked almost cinematic, even on the 17-inch notebook screen. The machine boasts a glossy, glare-resistant screen, the kind that are quickly becoming more common.

But let's get one thing straight: This isn't the kind of notebook you're going to want to take everywhere with you, and certainly not one for watching movies on an airplane or anywhere else you don't have a power outlet. With the disc playing I watched the battery run down from fully charged to less than 20% full in about 30 minutes, at which point the screen displayed one of the strangest shutdown routines I've ever seen: a patchwork of wavy multicolored lines.

Clearly this is more of a replacement for a desktop machine. Even without playing a Blu-Ray disc, you can expect only about two hours of battery life.

Besides that, the specifications are impressive. It has an Intel (INTC) Core Duo processor rated at 2 gigahertz that has two cores, or central brains, in the chip industry's version of the phrase "many hands make light work." (See BW, 2/6/06, "Amping Up Your Laptop". It also comes come with one gigabyte of memory standard, but can support up to two gigabytes of memory.

Its Graphics processor is an NVIDIA (NVDA) GeForce Go 7600GT, which itself boasts some features like 256 megabytes of graphics memory to make video look better and games more mind-blowing. It runs Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows XP Media Center Edition and has an internal TV tuner, ready to record both standard and high-definition TV programs. To that end it boasts a massive 200-gigabyte hard drive, which is plenty for standard definition video—you get about 26 hours of that for every 50 gigabytes, but with high-definition video, you get about four hours for every 50 gigabytes.

In addition to a Blu-Ray disc player, the drive also contains a Blu-Ray-capable burner. I didn't get to try this particular feature, but if you've got a camcorder capable of shooting high-definition video—no surprise Sony makes a few of those—you'll be able to edit your creations and burn them to a Blu-Ray disc and then watch them in all their high-quality glory. You can also connect the computer to play the content of the disc on a TV set, and it has S-Video and HDMI out connectors to do just that.

But in the end, is it worth the $3,500? It is a fine computer. But there are lots of fine computers on the market in the same size range, though none with the Blu-Ray capability.

Blu-Ray disc content is just now beginning to hit the market. (The computer ships with House of Flying Daggers in the box.) If you really, really want to shoot and edit HD video and have a critical need to burn it to Blu-Ray, you might be willing to pay the premium. But as yet, that's not a good enough reason for me to lay out that much to be an early Blu-Ray adopter. I suspect that will be the judgment of most people as well.

There's also the risk that you might end up backing the wrong horse in the brewing battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (see BW Online, 11/7/05, "I Want My HDTV—But Which Flavor?"). Unless you really think Blu-Ray is where it's at, and indeed many companies do, I suggest staying on the sidelines until the winner is clear.

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.