Toshiba Qosmio G30: Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile and HD DVD - Review

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HDMI and HD DVD

An HD DVD demo by Seal

The screen boasts a 1900x1200 resolution and has an excellent picture quality, and as we see more often with notebooks this is also a shiny kind of screen which makes the screen even more beautiful but makes it vulnerable to reflections in unfavourable lighting. The screen is powered by an nVidia GeForce Go 7600 which is equipped with 256 MB of video memory. This graphics card delivers excellent results in this combination, in notebook terms. Round the back we find two connectors attached to nVidia's graphics processor: a regular VGA port and an HDMI connector.

Next to the VGA port we find the HDMI connector.

This is also an indication of a decision to focus on the audio/video side of things, because HDMI is a standard which is used in many new digital a/v products. It transmits both sound and vision and when combined with HDCP it prevents unauthorized recording of the high-resolution material within. For an uncompromised high-resolution viewing experience of an HD DVD, a monitor, television or projector that supports this copy-controlled standard.

These HD DVD discs are played back in a Toshiba HD TS-802A player, in which they are read at 1x speed. Burning of HD DVDs is not yet possible, but in this versatile Toshiba product you can burn regular DVDs and CDs, though the speed is somewhat underwhelming. DVDs are written at a maximum of 4x and CD-Rs at just 16x. Taking into account the purchase price of the entire laptop, it shouldn't be a problem for the buyer to add a fast external DVD burner to the system.

The picture quality of HD DVD is undeniably beautiful, but it must be said that the results on this prototype weren't perfect yet. We registered some infrequent glitches in the screen and we did not succeed in optimizing the combination of the nVidia card and the HD-Ready TFT television in our test lab. No doubt these matters will be addressed with better drivers from nVidia and possibly also improvements in the InterVideo WinDVD HD DVD player that Toshiba had preinstalled on the notebook. For those who are done watching movies the Qosmio has an analog and a digital (DVB-T) television tuner. To control these two, Windows XP Media Center Edition can be used.

Thanks to the built-in 17 inch screen everything looks beautiful, but to really be immersed in the film at hand, separate speakers of headphones should be used. Even though Toshiba opted for the integration of speakers from the prestigious brand Harman Kardon, they are not capable of projecting the volume necessary to immerse the viewer in the movie. In combination with the right speakers the result is simply stunning.

Back to hardware, because apart from an HD DVD player the Qosmio has a lot more to offer. The notebook is equipped with two hard drives, in the case of our prototype these are two 100 GB 5400 rpm drives by Fujitsu. The model that is currently sold has two drives with a capacity of 120 GB. These drives can be set to be used in RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1 (mirroring) or as two separate hard disks. In our case, the last option was implemented.