Sony serves up another Blu-ray-equipped device to woo consumers to the world of HD.

The Sony Vaio VGN-FZ18G is a rather enticing notebook simply because of one thing – its Blu-ray drive.

Yes, the FZ18 is the latest effort in Sony's grand plan to push high-definition video into your living room (or in this case, on to your desk).

GOOD SCREEN: The FZ18 has a good LCD monitor. Inset: The noteboik comes in a nice twotone finish.

The notebook also comes with a required software (InterVideo WinDVD BD edition) to play Blu-ray movies and even has an HDMI port for connecting it to your big-screen LCD TV.

It's not just about watching, though – the FZ18's Blu-ray drive is also a writer, which means that you can author your own high-definition home videos (assuming you've also got a HD camcorder) onto writeable Blu-ray discs.

And if you take a look at the specs box above, the FZ18 is rather well endowed for a notebook PC too. So yes, it looks good on paper but we'll put it through its paces to see how it does in real life.

Take note, however, that the review unit here is a pre-production model so there may be some differences in performance between this and the final production version.

Striking visuals

When you switch it on, the first thing that'll strike you is the FZ18's LCD monitor, which is one of the nicest I've ever seen on a notebook.

While the viewing angles aren't as good as that of a high-quality desktop LCD monitor, it's good for a notebook.

What's most impressive, though, is its very wide colour gamut (due to the new LED backlight). When viewing your digital photos on the FZ18, you'll instantly notice how much richer the colours are – especially greens such as trees and grass.

There's a small amount of light falloff at the edges of the screen. But otherwise, it's a pretty good notebook monitor for colour-sensitive work.

The native resolution of 1,280 x 800pixels isn't as high as some other 15.4in notebook screens but it also means that on-screen fonts are bigger and, hence, easier to read.

Keep it at home

The FZ18 is a little on the large side, though it's only to be expected of a notebook with a 15.4in widescreen LCD. It's heavy too – tipping the scales at 2.7kg.

Its battery life isn't much to shout about either. I only managed one hour and 50 minutes of use at maximum power-saving settings (i.e. throttled CPU performance, low LCD brightness, no active wired/wireless networks, etc).

And that's when it was used solely for writing text documents. The FZ18 will probably fare worse when browsing the Web or simply listening to music. Good luck making it last through a 90-minute Blu-ray movie on your flight to Kazakhstan.

Sony clearly tried to liven up the FZ18's looks with a two-tone finish (black and silver) and even adorned the space between the keyboard and the LCD with a perforated, brushed metal surface.

Unfortunately, the rest of the notebook looks like it was designed in Taiwan. There are loads of fussy details and ergonomics that aren't quite up to scratch.

BLU BURNER: The Vaio FZ18's Blu-ray disc burner lets you author your own BLu-ray movies or back up huge amounts of data. Inset: Notice the two laser systems on the drive – one for Blu-ray, the other for DVD and CD.

For one thing, the keyboard is positioned too far to the front, leaving users with a rather cramped palm rest (with sharp edges, I might add).

The FZ18 also commits the cardinal sin of having a non-centred keyboard – the whole thing is offset to the left to make room for the Home, Page Up, Page Down and End keys on its rightmost edge.

And for an encore, Sony decided to cut off the right end of the right Shift key, making room for an Up arrow. If you're a touch typist and often strike the right shift button with your pinky, I'm sure you'll end up striking the up key accidentally more than once.

Well, I guess you could get used to it.

Performance

If there's one thing the FZ18 will never be short of, it's performance.

Its GeForce 8400 graphics card and 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor give it more punch than most notebook PCs – providing the FZ18 with fantastic graphics and raw processing power.

The notebook does quite well when playing the most graphically intense DirectX 9 games (such as Rainbow Six: Vegas and STALKER – expect the frame rate to hobble between 30 to 40 frames per second depending on your in-game graphics settings).

Unfortunately the relatively small amount of RAM (just 1GB) means that the FZ18 may stutter to a slideshow if you set your games' detail settings all the way up.

It handles Adobe Photoshop and general digital imaging work very quickly, though I must say that high-definition video editing leaves a bit to be desired.

Whether it's due to software, drivers or the fact that this is a pre-production FZ18, you may find yourself waiting for several minutes at a time to do basic high-definition video editing tasks (i.e. adding titles, transitions, effects and simple video trimming) with the bundled copy of Adobe Premier Elements 3.0.

However, I do have to mention that all the editing was done with the relatively new MPEG4 based AVCHD video codec created by Sony and Panasonic, which requires far more processing power to edit than standard-definition DV or even high-definition (MPEG-2 based) HDV videos.

I have a suspicion that the FZ18's HD video editing capabilities will be bolstered by improvements to the software video codecs and maybe by giving it more RAM (2GB sounds just about right).

But when it comes to actually watching Blu-ray films, the FZ18 does a fantastic job – video is rendered very well, whether you're viewing it on the LCD and through the HDMI port.

The FZ18's headphone/audio-out port is great too, with very low noise.

Burning Blu films

If you're thinking of authoring your high-definition home videos onto Blu-ray discs, be prepared to wait several hours (not including the very slow video editing process mentioned above).

Encoding and burning a Blu-ray movie disc may take up to an hour for every 15 minutes of video that you have.

Even though the FZ18's drive is supposed to be a 2x Blu-ray burner (9MB/s), it could only manage 1x burning speeds at most (usually hovering at 0.8x speeds).

It took six minutes and 25 seconds to burn 1.14GB of data (spread on 173 files) on to a BD-RE disc using Windows Vista's built-in disc-burning capabilities, which translates to about 2.9MBps or 0.62x burning speeds. Oh dear.

On the bundled Roxio Easy Media Creator, the same task took five minutes and 10 seconds – or 3.7MBps (0.82x). Faster, though nowhere near the intended mark.

This means that it'll take almost two hours to completely fill a 25GB BD-R. As Blu-ray burning software matures, we could see a burning speeds increase. But for now, this is as fast as it gets.

Conclusion

In the end, the FZ18 is better suited for those looking for a desktop replacement PC with the option of lugging it out of the house if needed. That's because of its fantastic work performance but only average portability and battery life.

The performance issues with authoring Blu-ray discs are only to be expected – most of the technology is new and unoptimised.

If you like the FZ18 but can live without the Blu-ray drive, you can save yourself quite a bit money and get the similarly specified Vaio FZ17 for RM6,488 instead.

Pros: Fantastic performance; very nice LCD screen.

Cons: Average ergonomics; poor battery life.

VAIO VGN-FZ18G (Sony Corp) Multimedia notebook PC Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz), 4MB L2 cache Memory: 1GB DDR2 SDRAM Display: 15.4in TFT LCD (1,280 x 800pixels) Graphics: nVidia GeForce 8400M GT (511MB total available graphics RAM) Storage: 160GB hard drive; 2x speed Blu-ray drive (compatible with BD-ROM/-R/-RE, DVD±RW/±R/-ROM and CD-R/-RW/-ROM media) Connectivity: WiFi (802.11a/g), Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, 56k modem, 10/100Base-T Ethernet I/O ports: Three USB 2.0 ports, Firewire port, ExpressCard/34 slot, 15- pin D sub monitor out, HDMI port, S-Video connector, headphone/mic jack. Other Features: Secure Digital (SD) memory card reader, Memory Stick reader, built-in webcam, complete software video editing and Blu- ray/DVD movie creation suite. Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Dimensions: 355.8 x 34.5 x 254mm Weight: 2.7kg (with supplied battery) Price: RM9,988 Review unit courtesy of Sony (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, 1300-88-1233

• 
• 
•