Sony Vaio FZ series: Stylish multimedia laptop

By Rory Reid on 31 May 2007, 12:03pm

Another day at Crave brings another new Sony laptop. Yesterday we hit you with the super-slim Vaio TZ series, and today we're beating you about the face with the Vaio FZ. Take that!

The FZ is a stylish beast. Its bright silver lid and matte-black keyboard section make it a real head-turner. Just don't take it outside -- the glossy 15.4-inch screen makes it all but unusable in direct sunlight.

Oddly, Sony has stuck a '1080 Full HD' sticker just below the keyboard. This is baffling, as the screen's native resolution is only 1,280x800 pixels, so it's 720p at best.

You can, however, output hi-def video to your big telly -- there's an HDMI port on the left side, along with S-Video and D-Sub outputs. Media playback can be controlled via the Media Center portion of Windows Vista Home Premium, or you can flick through tracks and adjust volume via the shortcut buttons above the keyboard.

Specs-wise, four versions of the FZ are available. The top-spec model (£1,499) has a Blu-ray drive and a 200GB hard drive. Our sample, the VGNFZ11S.CEK, uses an ordinary DVD drive, has 160GB of storage, a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo T7300 and 2GB of RAM, all for £1,100.

We like it. We're going to review it. Come back and read more about it soon. -Rory Reid