Llano in the Wild: Toshiba's Satellite L775D-S7206
by Dustin Sklavos on August 12, 2011 12:45 AM ESTSeventeen Inches of Mediocrity
The more notebooks I review, the more I find that the bog standard resolutions available for many of these form factors just aren't enough. 1366x768 in a 15.6" notebook borders on offensive, but 1600x900 at 17.3" really isn't a walk in the park either. The overall resolution is an improvement from the 1440x900 that old 17" notebooks used to run at, but dot pitch is still high. It seems like if you want a good screen, you need to find a notebook that supports 1080p.
Toshiba's Satellite L775D-S7206 sports a middling 17.3", LED-backlit 1600x900 screen that's serviceable but as you'll see, utterly unexciting. This is to be expected given the price tag and resulting market the notebook is aimed at.
Poor black levels keep the Satellite's Samsung panel from achieving a decent contrast ratio, and while the color gamut is alright, accuracy is in the toilet. Overall the screen is bright enough, but we're most definitely in budget laptop territory.
Viewing angles don't fare much better. This is a TN panel through and through and while notebooks like the substantially more expensive Alienware M17x R3 prove TN panels don't have to suck, it's still frustrating to see technology this mediocre continuing to run wild.
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elrui - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
At 450 bucks Asus offers an A3400 with 1gb discrete graphics. I bought one and am amazed at how capable it is.Novaguy - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
I think I just saw a Toshiba with a A4-3300M out there at Best Buy. I think it was priced at $399, so it was brushing up against E-350 pricing territory.I have not heard anything about this chip, though. Would like to get some reviews.
Baffo - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link
I noticed in the laptop specs, only mention was made for 1x2GB and 1x4GB configurations; is that simply as tested (in which case, was it tested with 2GB or 4GB RAM? Can be big difference for Win7 depending on what is running..), or as available from Toshiba? Since we are talking about an IGP (sorry, iGPU ;-) ), you are contending for memory bandwidth for GPU and CPU access, adding memory bandwidth can only help both. Or is the memory controller not sophisticated enough to accomplish what even early gen Athlon CPUs could do? If so, is DDR-1600 the only way to free up RAM access bottlenecks? Could be a real cheap upgrade and cost savings to buy the 2GB version, and buy an extra 2GB chip to boost performance both due to physical RAM exhaustion and interleaving for collision reduction.Valitri - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
Just wanted to give my 2 cents to the value of the A6 and why I just purchased one. I grabbed a Samsung 3 series from BestBuy yesterday for $399. It has the A6 3420m, 4Gb ram, 500GB 5400rpm hard drive, 1.3" thick and about 5 lbs. My reasoning for buying this was to take on an overseas deployment where it very well could not make it back. I wanted it cheap, able to skype, but also use it to play some games as my time sink. I've got WoW and about 15 games in steam loading on it as we speak, I'll repost when I can give more input on the performance. So far in windows, just loading webpages in chrome, downloading avast, steam, wow client, it all seems just fine. I'm really curious to see how well it will launch these games.