A laptop with a screen that’s distinctly off-colour
At an original price of £430 and currently discounted by £100, this mid-range laptop looks excellent value on paper – not least because rather than a compact 11 or 13in screen it has a full 15.6in display, the largest size you’ll generally see on today’s laptops. Add a quad-core processor and 8GB of memory, and you’ve got the makings of a PC that might be able to handle all your everyday jobs and show you a film or two in the evening – not just a second PC to carry around.
Switch it on, though, and the Satellite L50D-C-13G doesn’t quite live up to expectations. That big screen is marketed under the name ‘TruBrite’, which frankly just confirms our worst suspicions about the people who come up with names to market things. ‘Brite’ it isn’t: we measured 258 candelas per square metre. A candela is the official name for one candlepower, a homely unit reminiscent of ‘horsepower’. It simply represents the brightness of one ordinary candle. A candle is not very bright. 258 candles spread over a square metre still wouldn’t be very bright. In short, this laptop is not very bright. Frankly, whoever decided to call it ‘TruBrite’ is not very bright, because it’s not true. The contrast isn’t up to much, either, and the resolution is coarse.
If the ‘Tru’ part was meant to refer to colour fidelity, the description is not very accurate, and nor is the screen. According to our meter, it can reproduce only 62 per cent of the sRGB colour range. The technical term for that is ‘rubbish’. If you’ve ever wondered what a London bus would look like if it were orange instead of red, just Google it on this laptop. But make sure you look at the screen straighton, or you might not see it at all: the LCD panel serves only a narrow viewing angle.
In fact, the most vibrant part of the Satellite L50D-C-13G is the case, which is available in a choice of bright colours. Ours was purple. The touchpad was dyed to match but, being made of a completely different material, it didn’t. The paint job is ultra-glossy, as is the screen, perhaps in an attempt to distract you from the poor quality of the image with a constant reflection of your own face. This doesn’t really work when all you see is your face reflected back at you with a ‘Why is this screen so rubbish?’ expression.
The bottom of the machine is plain black, giving the impression it fell off and was replaced with the bottom of a different laptop found at a boot sale. Mercifully, a black top is also an option, making the design considerably easier on the eye. The keyboard does at least feel solid, as does the whole laptop, a quality reflected in its hefty 2.2kg weight. The keys don’t move very much, but most of them are the right size. The touchpad, though disappointingly small, surprised us with its good responsiveness.
The AMD processor, with built-in Radeon R6 graphics, delivered bargainbasement results in our speed tests, failing particularly badly at multi-tasking despite its four cores. Still, once you’ve waited for the free Windows 10 upgrade to install over the supplied Windows 8.1 operating system, the Satellite L50D-C-13G is quite usable, and the 1TB hard drive has room for all your stuff. Older 3D games can be persuaded to run, along with the likes of Minecraft. The battery gave us five hours 40 minutes of light use, which is better than many cheap laptops.
VERDICT
This is a more usable laptop than cheaper models, but it’s a shame nothing makes up for the nasty screen.
SPECIFICATIONS
1.8GHz AMD A10-8700P quad-core processor • 8GB memory • 1TB hard drive • DVD writer • 15.6in 1366x768-pixel touchscreen • Webcam • 802.11n Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.0 • 2x USB 3.0 ports • USB 2.0 port • SD card reader • HDMI port • Windows 8.1 Home (upgradable free to Windows 10) • 23.5x380x260mm (HxWxD) • 2.2kg • One-year warranty