I've been on a mission to find an 18-inch widescreen laptop that is not glossy and in the $1000 price range, and I've finally found the best one - 18.4" widescreen Sony VAIO AW Series Laptop VGN-AW450F/H. The regular price is $1149.99 but it was on sale till November 30 for $899.99. With $250 off is was a great deal. I found it right on the 30th ... but it was already sold out. What a bummer...
So I've added it my wish list and hopefully Sony will notify me when it's available again. Why am I making a big deal out of it? It's simple really. To my best research, as of this November 2009, only three major laptop manufacturers make 18" laptops: Toshiba, Acer and Sony. Neither Dell nor HP nor Gateway nor Lenovo do. At least not for around $1000. And between all three brands only 3 models are available in this price range, including the VAIO VGN-AW450F/H.
The main problem is that the other two (one from Toshiba and one from Acer) are glossy black and this would drive me nuts seeing all fingertips on them and having light reflected in my eyes.
There is a very limited choice of laptops with 18" screen, and they had to make them all glossy, unbelievable. As you go down to 17" and 16" laptops, the choices are plenty but you got to scroll much more to actually see the contents on the Internet because these smaller screens are so narrow. All the new widescreen laptops seem to made to watch movies or play games, and no one cares much about people who uses them to design websites or develop code or do some heavy image editing.
Constant scrolling cuts your productivity by half - this is why I prefer the 18.4" laptop, the largest diagonal size you can find today. And Sony VAIO AW Series Laptop VGN-AW450F/H was the only laptop I've found that comes in Titanium Gray and is practically not glossy at all! And of course, a nice NVIDIA 512MB VRAM graphics card helps to enable the very sharp 1280x800 resolution that I use most when designing websites. Hopefully, it'll be on sale again and soon...
So I've added it my wish list and hopefully Sony will notify me when it's available again. Why am I making a big deal out of it? It's simple really. To my best research, as of this November 2009, only three major laptop manufacturers make 18" laptops: Toshiba, Acer and Sony. Neither Dell nor HP nor Gateway nor Lenovo do. At least not for around $1000. And between all three brands only 3 models are available in this price range, including the VAIO VGN-AW450F/H.
The main problem is that the other two (one from Toshiba and one from Acer) are glossy black and this would drive me nuts seeing all fingertips on them and having light reflected in my eyes.
There is a very limited choice of laptops with 18" screen, and they had to make them all glossy, unbelievable. As you go down to 17" and 16" laptops, the choices are plenty but you got to scroll much more to actually see the contents on the Internet because these smaller screens are so narrow. All the new widescreen laptops seem to made to watch movies or play games, and no one cares much about people who uses them to design websites or develop code or do some heavy image editing.
Constant scrolling cuts your productivity by half - this is why I prefer the 18.4" laptop, the largest diagonal size you can find today. And Sony VAIO AW Series Laptop VGN-AW450F/H was the only laptop I've found that comes in Titanium Gray and is practically not glossy at all! And of course, a nice NVIDIA 512MB VRAM graphics card helps to enable the very sharp 1280x800 resolution that I use most when designing websites. Hopefully, it'll be on sale again and soon...
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