^M00:00:01 [ Music ] ^M00:00:02 >> Hi, I'm Scott Stein, Senior Associate Editor at cnet.com and this is the Samsung MPR580JSV1US. Every year we take a look at various retail laptop configurations for users to find out which ones may be out there that we haven't talked about that present a particularly great combination of value for your money. We don't normally see Samsung laptops available at all and this mainstream one is part of a recent laptop release by Samsung and was a retail configuration and has a fantastic value for its cost. For only 829 dollars the MPR580 includes 500 gigs hard drive, 4 gigs of RAM, a Core I 5 processor which is one of Intel's core I processor line up and also includes NVIDIA Geforce 310 M processor which is really great to see graphics if you want to do some casual or mainstream gaming. It even includes a Blu-Ray drive, so it really covers all basis and at 829 dollars it's at least 150 dollars cheaper than similarly configured models and of course would it be as good as advertised. Well, the 15.6 inch screen, the screen was perfectly great for us for viewing movies for editing and casual office work, the brightness was nice, the keyboard is a full keyboard along with a semi squish number pad we've seen before on models from Aces that is actually very comfortable to type on, sort of a raised Chiclet style keyboard that's becoming very popular. With the exception of the arrow keys over here that are a little bit squished on the side and are a little hard to locate. And the track pad is okay, it's a mat track pad that is flush with the rest of the lap top. One really cool thing is there are four blue LED lights, one on each corner of the track pad that let you see it in low lighting conditions, sometimes it's hard to make out where your track pad is when it's not inset on its own. One thing we really didn't like is the button beneath the track pad which is really narrow and flush and one of those rocker types so you can't figure out where the discrete buttons, we found it really hard to locate when we were typing and using the laptop. However, it's hard to quibble at this value, you know the outside appearance is pretty attractive too, it has a 3 D type of a pattern with this touch of color type design, not unlike what we've seen in Samsung HDTV's certainly attracts finger prints but you know its not unattractive and it's actually surprisingly light weight. Our one knock on the laptop is has under three hours of battery life, which is a let down but hopefully you can forgive it for this price and just keep it plugged in near an outlet. Running up the Samsung laptop it actually has great selection of ports, its got a VGA, HDMI, it even has an ESATA combo port if you want to plug in a hard drive, its got an express card slot, I mean it really covers a lot of bases more than we see in many lap tops and will provide you pretty much with about every thing that you need short of a firewire port. I'm Scott Stein and this is the Samsung MPR580JSV1US. ^M00:02:57 [ Music ] ^M00:02:59
