Sony Vaio F-series laptop goes all 3D
Sony's already wowed our eyeballs with its amazing 3D televisions, and it's all set to do the same with a brand new Vaio F-series 3D laptop.
Sony's already wowed our eyeballs with its amazing 3D TVs, and is all set to do the same with a brand-new Vaio F-series 3D laptop. Unveiled at CES in Las Vegas today, the Vaio F series sports a 16-inch screen that uses the same technology as Sony's Bravia 3D TVs.
In other words, the display rapidly shows alternate images with a slightly different perspective while a pair of LCD shutter glasses darken one lens then the other, blocking vision alternately in each eye in time with the screen's refresh rate by. Your brain stitches the images together to create the impression of depth.
The F-series laptop's 16-inch screen has a Full HD 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution and displays images at a rapid 240 frames per second, ensuring silky-smooth motion. This should, in theory at least, result in a reduced chance of brain-melting headaches, which can sometimes be caused by slower screens.
The Sony Vaio F series supports 'native' 3D content -- ie 3D Blu-ray discs, 3D games and videos, plus 3D panoramic photos captured with Cyber-shot digital cameras and Sony's Alpha dSLR cameras.
It can also convert non-native 2D content into 3D. Users simply hit a dedicated 3D button on the laptop and clever software 'up-converts' 2D Blu-ray or DVD films to 3D on the fly. It sounds magical, but this sort of conversion is usually pants, in our experience, so we'll reserve judgment on the effectiveness of the Sony system until we've seen it for ourselves in the flesh.
The Vaio F series looks set to feature impressive audio. Music and movies can be played back in "cinema-style" surround sound through headphones with Dolby Home Theatre v3, and the laptop creates a virtual 5.1-channel surround sound effect from two Inbox bass-reflex speakers. Again, we'll wait for a full ears-on test before passing judgement.
Those interested in core specs will be pleased to hear the Vaio F Series, in its VPC-F21Z1E/BI guise, sports an Intel Core i7 processor (we're assuming it's a Sandy Bridge model), 8GB of DDR3 1,333MHz SDRAM, a 640GB 7,200rpm hard drive, Nvidia GeForce GT540M graphics with 1GB of dedicated VRAM and a Blu-ray disc drive.
It'll be available for an as yet unconfirmed price from the end of February.