Sony Vaio C series hands-on photos show off spectrum-spanning laptops

Picture a laptop. Boring black box, right? Not any more -- Sony's gone all toddler with the poster paints, and slathered its new C-series laptops in a set of hyper-bright colours.

Those colours are bright green, orange, pink, black and white, and as well as a luminous palette, these portable PCs have a rather interesting design.

The keyboard, for instance, comes with an optional rubberised cover, which keeps your keys protected, and prevents the keyboard from filling with horrible dust. There's also a weird 'lip' that bulges out over the bottom of the wrist rest, along the edge of the laptop's chassis, and a bunch of retro-styled buttons just below the screen.

That's a 14-inch LED backlit display, fact fans, pumping out visuals at a rate of 1,366x768 pixels.

The C series ain't just a pretty face though -- these colourful cuties are packing some serious heat, in the form of Intel Core i5 processors, 4GB of RAM and AMD Radeon HD6470M graphics cards.

With that kind of spec, we'd estimate these quirky-looking machines offer some pretty potent performance. There's also a 320GB hard drive on board, and the whole shebang runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, with a DVD rewritable drive wedged in the side.

This design is definitely going to be divisive -- we quite like it, and we admire Sony's guts in trying something different, but there will certainly be some people who struggle to suppress a gag reflex when they first clap eyes on these retina-searing machines.

What do you reckon? Let us know in the comments, or on our Facebook page.