New Gadget From HP - Envy 17 3D

I took a closer look at HP Envy on September 17 and found a lot to like , plus some things that bugged me. So goes the majority of products - there is no perfect portable. Now HP refreshing the Envy 17, the addition of a new stereoscopic 3D display an funtionality.

In fact, the HP business PC World had only one small difference, in addition to the display, the previous version. Envy 17 with the new 3D had a single 500GB disk, rather than a pair of 320 GB discs. The CPU, RAM, Blu-ray, and GPU are all the same. So I'm not going to dwell on features like USB ports, processor, or network - those are all more or less the same. The carry AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5850 GPU, however, is a key component to enable 3D stereoscopic, but may also be a weakness, as we shall see.

One thing that has brought down a bit 'was the score on PC WorldBench 6 performance. This is because the battery life of 17 3D Envy appears to be significantly shorter - 1 hour, 27 minutes, compared with 2:19 on the original. This may be because the refresh rate of 120Hz display required for the stereoscopic 3D, sucks more juice. A single disk, instead of two disks in a RAID array, they can also have an impact WorldBench scores, as some of its landmarks scales well with the performance of storage.

Let's talk about that before entering the display stereoscopic quality and performance. The display for normal 2D is just as good as the original Envy 17. viewing angles are far better than most laptop computers, color fidelity in digital photos and video appear to be accurate, and also the black levels in movies are surprisingly robust for a notebook PC. The only thing that I wanted a matte finish - the gleam of the glossy finish on the LCD panel gets pretty annoying at times. I played several standard 2D Blu-ray, including Serenity, Star Trek, and Kick-Ass, and they all looked pretty sweet.

Now for the stereoscopic 3D. The new LCD panel has a refresh rate up to 120Hz, which makes a 3D stereoscopic proposal much more enjoyable. The possibility of headaches and eye strain is reduced to a higher refresh rates, but if you're like me, long viewing periods may still be hard on your eyes.

HP provides stereoscopic viewing with third-party hardware and software Tridef. 3D glasses to use the same type of LCD shutter technology as competing products from Nvidia 3DVision, but the glasses are a bit 'bulkier. This is a problem if you do not wear glasses, but I found them better than glasses Nvidia in my case, because they fit a bit 'better on my normal glasses

Driving the display is the Mobility Radeon HD 5850 referred to above, which is starting to get a bit 'long in the tooth. For the game in "normal" 3D is still pretty good. But when using stereoscopic 3D, you need to twice the frame rate. This is a proposal difficult for most mobile GPU. The way to get around performance issues is to reduce the resolution to 1280 x 720. Given the reduced brightness and contrast, you will not notice major differences in image quality, and the 3D effect can be quite impressive.

When it works.

• Therein lies the problem. Tridef software solution for stereoscopic 3D gaming is far from perfect, especially when confronted with 3DVision Nvidia. When you start first time (the software to launch game), it scans your system for games, but the utility could find only two titles: Dawn of War II and Civilization V. The rest of the games that were installed had to be added manually.

• When the games were actually executed, the experience can be frustrating. For example, two games - F1 2010 and Just Cause 2 - since this small jewel of an error when we tried to launch the app launcher Tridef:

• Just Cause 2 is, in fact, a DirectX 10 game. F1 2010, which produced a similar error, it is DX11. I tried to update the software Tridef from its site, but the problem persisted.

• Some games work well, even if imperfectly. I got solid stereoscopic 3D with Batman: Arkham Asylum and Dawn of War II. However, some ghosting was visible, probably due to non-perfect convergence of 3D images. Moving near or far from the display had no effect. The utilities Tridef seems to offer no way to calibrate the screen and glasses. The ghost was very weak, and not particularly painful, but it's still there, and is not visible when you run on a system based on Nvidia.

• Civilization V popped a message in-game "Tridef Ignition does not yet support DirectX 11 for this game. Retry with DirectX 9."

• Running in DirectX 9 did not yield pleasant stereoscopic 3D, but at the cost of some cool DX11 effects. Once again, Nvidia 3DVision ran the same player in the DX11 mode.

• Okay, so stereoscopic 3D games are a mixed bag when you try to run the Envy 17 3D. What about Blu-ray 3D? The story here is much better. Both the Disney 3D Sampler Blu-ray and test the 3D solitary disk calibration THX worked beautifully. The clips are all animated Disney, and look really good. The sound quality seems to be the same Envy on the original 17, which is to say pretty darn good for a laptop, although you can if you're looking for headphones for deeper bass.

• Clearly, HP, AMD, and Tridef have a lot of work to do to catch up with Nvidia the benefit of two years when it comes to 3D games. However, HP Envy 17 3D offers extensive experience in 3D stereoscopic 3D Blu-ray, and if this is your main interest on the stereo display, the Envy offers a quality 3-D 17.