Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV650 Laptop PC w/HD DVD review

I guess my first question is, does anyone else have this?

I received mine today and have played with it for a few hours. If you're not aware, this is desktop-replacement laptop with a 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 1GB RAM, and a pair of 100GB drives. It also includes a 1920x1200 17" 16:10 screen. And of particular note to this forum, it includes a HD-DVD ROM drive, software for HD-DVD playback and a HDMI output.

Initial impressions are great - even phenomenal. For a 17" notebook, I have no complaints. Performance is blazing fast... I think this only gives up gaming video performance to the Inspiron XPS from Dell, otherwise it's more or less on par with the fastest portable PCs you can buy today. The screen stands out. It's the best 1920x1200 screen I've ever used. I'm typing this on it now. Blacks are black, whites are white, nary a dead pixel, great uniformity and color appears to be very good. This is an amazing display. Ergonomics are a little less spectacular - the keyboard is OK but could be a bit bigger given the size of this thing. And it is a 10lb beast, not terribly portable. It gets warm, too. Be warned. On-board sound is great, perhaps the best I've heard in a laptop. (Just like the screen.)

OK, on to HDDVD - I only have Serenity. When putting the disk in the drive, it takes about 20-30 seconds to load before video starts playing. Not too bad, and I gather it to be a little faster than perhaps the A1 player? The software is "WinDVD HD for Toshiba" - I know little about it except that it appears to be a separate executable from the standard WinDVD that's also included. Video quality... well, it's what you would expect! Ridiculously good. I feel like I'm seeing every piece of detail I'd ever want to see in a movie. The format makes good use of the panel. I don't know if I'm seeing 1080i or 1080p or what. Not sure how to tell. CPU on both cores runs around 90% according to task manager, during playback. We watched Serenity end-to-end and there maybe was a stutter or two, not noticable at all. Hopefully future refinements to the software will bring down CPU consumption a bit & give the notebook a little more headroom to work with.

I have a Sanyo PLV-Z4 and will give HDMI output a shot, tomorrow. In the meantime I did want to say that my initial impressions are positive. This is an expensive device, for sure, but it's full-featured to the extreme, and HD-DVD playback is a nice bonus on the side.

Feel free to post any questions and I'll do my best to answer, though bear in mind that I'm not the most experienced person about this stuff....

Mine says "Made in Japan" on the bottom.

Very quiet--this is a strength. The laptop does have an on-board fan that does kick in and make sound, however I've only been able to get it to kick in when playing games that stretch the GeForce Go 7600 card. The optical drive does make seeking sounds during disk insertion (for ~ 10 seconds) that sounds a lot like the old 3.5" floppy drives, however during playback the drive is quiet - I can't hear it from more than 3-4 feet away, and that's in a silent room. Likewise the hard drives are also silent--I haven't heard them at all. I should also add that the laptop came with some Toshiba utility to set the HD-DVD drive in "normal" versus "acoustically silent for playback of media" mode. I have it on "normal" -- it may be even quieter with in the other mode.

More feedback:

This screen is extremely sensitive. I see a whole lot of what seems like digital noise in Serenity, single pixel at 1920x1200. At full screen, it's not too distracting past a few feet but it's noticable. A friend said that he was pretty sure this was film grain rather than a format or codec issue. A few of the pure CGI scenes lacked this extremely high frequency noise, so we tend to believe that the HDDVD format indeed can replicate film grain.

This noise can't be seen at all on my Sanyo PLV-Z4. Output was via HDMI. Yes, I fed a projector HDMI from a laptop! What can I say. It worked, and beautifully. It sends out 1080i (don't think it's 1080p, not that the Sanyo would accept that?) but there weren't any weird handshake or other issues. It worked, and worked well. The video quality was phenomenal. It's the best I've ever see, and a leap beyond the HD HBO and Showtime that we watch from digital cable. Unbelievable! I wish I had more titles.

Intervideo WinDVD HD has some issues. Mouse navigation of all the menus doesn't work that well. For example I haven't been able to get to the special features section using the touchpad, for example--those menus are just unresponsive. Occasionally navigation just stops working altogether and I have to restart WinDVD HD. It definitely feels a little unfinished.

Though by default, in WinDVD HD you can turn on hardware acceleration. Do so! In my first post I mentioned each core running at 90%++ with occasional stutter. With HW support turned on, the stuttering effectively disappeared. Chapter navigation is fast and fluid. I can now have HDDVD running in a window while doing other things! Occasionally other software likes to freeze while WinDVD is playing HD content. Again, I take this to be about bugs in either Windows or WinDVD support.

On Day 2, my impressions have grown very positive. This is a screaming fast laptop that actually does play HD-DVD movies well. And as I figure out some of the things, the downsides continue to decrease.

TOSHIBA DVDW/HD TS-L802A

The out-of-box configuration is filled with background processes. There are a wide variety of Toshiba utilities, some Office Trial stuff, McAfee and some stuff I'd never heard of. As I disable things, I'm finding it running smoother and smoother. I'd say that the hardware can playback HDDVD (at least the 24mbit Serenity disk) to 1920x1200 with maybe 20% headroom to spare with the current software. That's not too bad, I guess.

I'll be reinstalling everything tomorrow and should have a better idea.

I had a Dell Latitude D800 (I think a similar 1.7GHz Centrino to yours?) which could play WMVHD 720p clips ok but tended to struggle (sometimes badly) with 1080p. The Toshiba has absolutely no problem with WMVHD 1080p... I think CPU utilization on either core never got past 30%!

Some places seem to have messed up specs. The AV600 and AV650 models end up getting their specs changed a bit. The AV600 is the one with the lower res screen. The AV650 adds to it,
- 1920x1200 screen
- HD-DVD ROM
- 2x100GB disks instead of 2x80GB
- T2500 core duo instead of T2400 core duo
- HDMI outupt
- maybe some other stuff, not sure

Check Toshiba for the correct info. Also, I think some Circuit City stores may be stocking this in your area now, check it out.

Whether that's worth the $800 premium (give or take) is up to you! I do notice that the AV650 screen may not be quite as good as the AV600 one. The black levels on this screen are good, but not great...

After about a week, I'm delighted at this laptop. I've gotten a few more HDDVD titles (e.g. Chronicles of Riddick) and continue to be amazed at the PQ. I am having a hard time getting information about this laptop, though. I've read that the panel is rendering native 1080p off the disc but 1080i out the HDMI output, but I can't confirm; my projector is a 720p LCD.

WinDVD HD is buggy. It has trouble with a variety of Serenity menus. Riddick was better. However, I did use the Toshiba A1 player matched up against the Qosmio and we actually agreed that the laptop is the better player - it starts up faster, loads disks faster, is somewhat quieter. We also felt that the chances of getting upgrades / support on the Qosmio are waaaay better than the A1, owing to it being a basically a MCE computer running easily upgradable all-commodity software. Of course, it costs about 6 times as much as the A1 player... big downside.

After using the A1, I do prefer the G35-AV650 as the top HDDVD playback device at this time... it really can do it all!

JaPhule - I only have been able to get 1080i output (so far) from HDMI. There is no support for most iHD features at this time. As far as I can tell, this functionality is simply not implemented in WinDVD HD at this time... that could change with a future release.

wuwoze - HDDVD playback definitely can be affected if you're playing a disc at the same time you're doing a bunch of other stuff. I've gotten CPU util % down to about 80% plus or minus a few, during playback.

cine - you definitely can view the contents of discs in Windows Explorer (nice 10+GB files!) but there's nothing I can do with them.

I've gotten a few more discs and playback has been flawless so far. Every issue I've run into was WinDVD related so I do believe this is a pretty good platform for HD-DVD playback on a PC. It's also a blindingly fast laptop with a fantastic 17" screen...

Battery life (with some of the savings gizmos turned on) is JUST BARELY ENOUGH to get through a full movie like Serenity on a single charge. I'd say it's about 90 minutes with screen, processor, wifi, etc. cranked to maximum. If you throttle down the screen brightness a bit, I think you can get away with a movie, but just barely. Playback actually works OK on battery. The only difference is that when plugged into AC, I suspect that one of the dual backlights (LED?) is kept off to save battery. Basically you can't run the screen at its max brightness unless you are plugged into AC. But it's not bad on battery.

I get more than an hour of battery, that's for sure. The laptop comes with only one battery and only space for one, so you can't swap batteries w/o powering down the laptop.

My impression is that there is no scaling going on when watching HD-DVD. I *thought* HD-DVD 2.35:1 content is something like 1920x800 or so, and it appears to be displayed as such... this is a 16:10 screen so there's a lot of blank space above and below the video. I truly believe (now) that the hi freq noise is either film grain or camera noise. It very nearly is single-pixel noise, which is why it's not noticeable from more than a couple of feet away.

I have no idea why no 1080p out of HDMI and I sure get the sense that nobody really knows. One big thing I'm still trying to understand is whether the laptop is sending 1080p video data (from HD-DVD) to the native panel.

Forest Fan, I definitely look forward to hearing your experience comparing HDMI output to a 1080 display to what's seen on the LCD. I'm still not sure (either way) whether I'm seeing 1080i or 1080p on the laptop's 17" LCD. I can't see a reason why it wouldn't be 1080p.

I don't think 1080i/p will matter much to the average Joe; put me in the camp that believes this war will be won or lost on the basis of price and titles alone.

I can't get the 650 to do 720p which is a real disappointment! My projector (Sanyo Z4) is 720p...

Well, I'm pretty sure this is not going to the panel "directly" as in bypassing the OS, etc. The WinDVD HD window is just like any other media player, I can resize it, move it around my desktop, and so forth. I agree with you that if the source is 1080p it seems very weird to me that the panel would not be displaying that full 1080p source. IF that's the case, then us laptop owners are among the first to really enjoy the full 1080p experience I guess the big question is, where does the 1080p-->1080i conversion take place? In software in the HDDVD decoder? Or in electronics associated with the HDMI output? Or somewhere else?