Samsung Series 7 Laptops - 15.0" and 15.6" Models (NP700Z4 & NP700Z5)

i don't think it's that important. unless you do a lot photography works in that screen, black level is very very important.

 

Regarding the dragging: you can tap 2 times on a file etc. and on the second time you can drag it with one finger. If you like to use 2 fingers: click on the left side of the touchpad and move with another finger...

That was'nt a problem for me, but for me the touchpad was too sensitive, had to regulate it in the driver for my likings.

 

1 hour 39 minutes?! That's horrible! Hoping it's simply because their test machine was an i7... but they don't declare what 'light use' and 'heavy use' are.

 

i dont understand about charging to 80%.

This I have to chose manually if I want to charge till 80% battery (for more years quality)?

or it always charge till 100%?



and what about windows preinstalled on laptop... Is this normal windows 7 ultimate there? I will installed it my myself - is there something special - or normal WIn 7 + all drivers that I probably have in the box?!

 

You can choose if you want to charge to 80% only.

I have Win 7 Professional, but mostly its shipped with Home Premium.
Yes the drivers + Samsung software is preinstalled.

 

1.is charging to 80% much better for battery?
2. but ultimate is the best version of windows 7 right?
3. but if I want slo leanguage + ultimate. I have to format disk? and then I will need drivers and software on CD/DVD, is threre or I need from website?

4. ganxxta: I will buy in the same shop as you -aahcen studentbook. HOw are you satisfied with service there? i will have 4 years warranty, but are they nice & fair?
b) screen will be enough good for browsing, office, youtube, sometimes a movie? before I have asus x51l and hp compaq 7400. and it was enough.
what you think?

 

1. According to Samsung it is... I'm not a battery expert so no idea.
2. Well, its the most expensive one. For most people Professional or even Home Premium is more than enough. But if you already have Ultimate than there is nothing to say against it.
3. Yes for that you have to format. Don't know if the drivers are on the recovery disc or only the whole Windows image + drivers on it...
But you can download drivers and software from Samsung

4. Can't complain about the shop, bought my second notebook there.
The 4 years warranty are directly from Samsung.

The screen is good enough for me for the usage you mentioned. Can't compare it to the notebooks you mentioned.

 

I saw the Bestbuy screen myself. Looked far from impressive to me. In my opinion Notebookcheck's review is more accurate.

resolution: good
brightness: good
color gamut: mediocre
contrast: mediocre
black levels: poor
viewing angles: very poor

Test Samsung Serie 7 700Z5A Notebook - Notebookcheck.com Tests

In my opinion: people that are looking for a good display (and are able to recognize one) should look for other laptops.

People that are satisfied with average notebook screens will probably be happy with this display.

 

The mentions I have seen from Samsung which reference 80% of battery are about overall battery lifespan before it wears out significantly. They claim the battery can undergo many more charge/recharge cycles than other batteries can before the battery ages enough that it provides less than 80% of its full as-new performance. I saw a video in which they claimed something like 1500 such cycles before battery performance was reduced to 80% of new vs. 300 cycles for others. Don't know what this claim is based on, but that's what they claimed.

I didn't see anything which recommended charging to only 80%. It is my understanding that modern batteries are best maintained when charged fully, not just part way.

 

Thanks, ganxxta.

One more thing: When you type with fingers in ASDF - ;LKJ keys, is the touchpad interfere your typing? I mean, the cursor move around etc?

And, the left palmrest seems very small compared to the right one. Is this going to be a problem? I'm a writer and photographer, and i'm going to type a lot in this machine.

 

You can disable the touchpad with a FN key if the cursor moves around.
But it wasn't a big problem for me yet. You can also lower the sensitiveness of the touchpad to avoid such inputs.

Regarding the palmrest, its like that because on the right side there is the numpad, so the touchpad is in the middle of the keyboard.

 

Maybe it's possible that Samsung is using different screens? The one tested by notebookcheck was the cheaper German model, so maybe the higher end models have better screens?

Anyways I'm primarily interested in the 14'' for portability reasons and waiting for that one and reviews of it to come out. In the meantime I've got a question that might be of interest to all potential Samsung Chronos 7 owners: notebookcheck mentions that the express cache is a Sandisk msata SSD. Would it be possible to replace that SSD with a higher SSD and configure it as a regular drive instead of as an express cache drive?

 

Nope they have not.

 

Guys, I asked notebookcheck to do an English version review for the laptop so that we could have a clearer idea about it.

Here is their reply:

 

I have a pretty good understanding of German language. Mariofzs translation is good enough.

 

I have the 700Z5A S03 too, and so fare I am quied happy. Ok, the screen could be better but vor me it´s ok. It's better as my old Samsung x60.

@ Ganxxta: I have some issues with my expresscache. After encrypting my Drive Easy Settings doesn't notice expresscache. Altough the expresscache process runs in the windows taskmanager. Do you know how I can profe if expresscache is on or not?

 

Kaput! (only kidding and it did get an 83% and I can use HDMI --- no laptop is perfect, including the MBP.)

 

To be honest i'd say we'd be having none of these issues with the screen if the laptop came with a glossy screen rather than matte. If i'm honest, I prefer glossy screens.

 

Hm, hard to tell

as far as I know the SSD has its own partition, so maybe you encrypted it too?
I don't know how exactly the Express Cache driver works, but theoretically it should work with encrypted drives also.

Maybe you can test the boot times from cold boot, if they are slower than before, than the Express Cache doesn't work.

 

Kaput t! it is

 

Just had a look at the display model in PC World. Overall I'm quite impressed.

OK the screen isnt brilliant, but I think most people wouldnt really notice if it wasnt for this heated discussion people have been having here.

Other observations: There is some minor flex in the keyboard when typing in certain areas, its not something you feel, but it is something you see if you look very closely. It is rather minor though.

When lifting it, the underside flexes a bit and feels a bit cheap. Underneath is made of plastic so it doesnt feel like the same quality as the rest.

 

You guys need to lay off the screen. I had an Acer Timeline 3810t which, according to notebookcheck, had an even worse screen than the Samsung, 153:1: Review Acer Aspire 3810T Notebook - Notebookcheck.net Reviews.
My current computer is a 2010 Vaio Z with an absolutely top-of-the-line 773:1 screen:
Test Sony Vaio VPC-Z12 Subnotebook - Notebookcheck.com Tests

The only difference I noticed when moving from one to the other was that the Z was much brighter (even to the extent of causing eyestrain). I didn't notice the difference in contrast AT ALL. When I had the Timeline I felt like it had a great screen.

Some people (especially people influenced by Apple marketing) think that if anything they have is less than dedicated-professional quality then they're being duped or something. This is just intended to make you spend more money. (Quantitative reviews really make this worse, because people make decisions based on meaningless numbers and not their own subjective experience which is all that really matters.) I'm on my computer for at least 8 hours a day, and I'm not stupid. I just didn't notice the difference between screens in practice, and I'm not bothered by it now. The idea that a screen like this makes it unfit for multimedia use is ridiculous.

Anyway, mario and akula, if you aren't gonna buy it, can you go hang out in another thread?

 

Hi guys, i just got my series 7 yesterday, and i must thank you for lowering my expectations that much, this computer is awesome

The screen is perfectly fine imo, as long as you adjust the angle once you sit down.

There is a bit of bloatware you have to spend like ½ an hour uninstalling, but this is probably something that enables samsung to sell this machine this cheap (agreements with symantec and what not).

Its lightning fast, super light, has super battery life. I don't think i could find a better pc laptop I could have chosen the MBP, but i don't like the fact that its allways form over function with apple! Samsung really packed a ton of features into this neat little package.

Now sorry for inflating your expectations, but i was nervous when buying it because of this forum, and i wanted to let you know that it is a excellent laptop. My only concern MAY be the graphics card drivers that aren't directly upate'able from AMD, but i think a bit of pressure to samsung on their facebook page would help them keep them updated

 

No, you are ignorant, your 700:1 screen is ridiculous compared to 20000:1 TV screens ! I can see the difference without putting them side by side!
Even on professional use (radiology/illustrators...) LCD's whites are calibrated at 100-110 cd/m² maximum, anything over that will strain the eye and wash out the nearby pixels blacks & contrasts, the chronos tops at 270cd/m² (not exactly the 300 advertised so shame on them). You only need 200+ for usage outdoors or glare screen shinethrough.

As for the black, the professional use requirement is commonly 0,5 cd/m² so the chronos has three times "lighter" blacks, but three times out of nothing is still nothing to the CASUAL eye or someone who is not focusing on "the black levels" for his work.
Of course it's nicer like apple and samsung to advertise crazy luminosity nits. Because the contrast ratio is just max nit - min nit / min nit = for the samsung (270-1.7/1.7)= 157:1 and real usage contrast ratio of (100 nits-1.7/1.7) = 57:1

So dont be so fooled by benchmark and probes maniacs, I look at top quality screens everyday for radios and I frankly dont give a damn about it in the end, because I really can't see a difference unless I put the two screens side to side in a pitch black room and look at the damn blacks for some nearly imaginary difference on the black levels.
Even the nbc review is honest about it, before the measurements they judged the screen fine, and afterwards its "HO NOES OMG russians have initiated defcon 1 !!!! DAMN YOU SAMSUNG".

 

Simply not true. I use only matt and never have seen viewing angles this bad. You literally have to play with the screen everytime you sit down at it to get it just right... With my t500, my wife and I can watch a movie together side by side and not invert.

 

We have to remember a lot of those tvs with 10000:1 and 20000:1 contrast are really only 500:1. You have to see if the value given is dynamic contrast, or true contrast ratio. By using that one word, they can greatly inflate the numbers...

 

I think he was joking...

 

just calm down and stop speculating, just wait few more days then you can see it yourself, and force yourself not coming to this thread for few days. speculation is pointless, and if Samsung said something will be there(backlit keyboard, 6750...)it will be there, this is a major international comany for god's sake, it's not your neighbor 11 yrs old boy who shots wolf is coming whenever he feels like.

 

Welcome to the club

Yeah the driver updates are going to be tricky if samsung forgets this laptop in ~3 months like every manufacturer does...

But thank god there is the good old www and smart people how can make the official driver work on every machine

 

Thanks!
Yes, that is exactly my concern. Do you have any more links for sites that work towards standard drivers?

Having such a newly released computer, one does feel a bit "lost at sea" when it comes to information

 

I only have this one left... it seems, that this one is no longer in development.

Its a shame that Samsung doesn't use the official drivers, how hard can it be? (to quote Clarkson^^)

 

Each to his own of course. For me the difference between an Acer Timeline screen screen and Sony Z is huge. I notice large differences in black levels, black details, and color coverage (besides the more obvious differences in brightness and resolution). The Z covers twice the color space of the Acers screen.

You might think that people are influenced by marketing. Consider that some people just have a better eye for it.

As an analogy: To me a $10 bottle of wine might taste good. To someone who knows more about wine it may taste horrible.

 

Maybe if I looked at them side-by-side I'd be able to pick out the differences. The point is, they don't feel any different in practice.

People making decisions based on the screen (who aren't professional designers or photographers) are like people who buy thousands of dollars of professional rock-climbing gear to work out at the gym.

 

I agree that most average consumers will be fine with the screen. It's the people that have an eye for it that will be disappointed (if they were expecting anything more than average).

 

Right, I'm mostly just objecting to making decisions based on numbers in a review and trumpeting those numbers as the ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE DECIDING FACTOR! Look at the screen yourself and see if it's right for you.

 

Hello all.

I've been lurking on this thread for a while (enjoying seeing the too-ing and fro-ing of the debates of primarily the screen and the graphics card).

Living in the UK, I've been trying to decide between a Sony SE and the Samsung S7 Chronos (700Z5A) and being steered towards the S7 by reading some of the comments on here. MBP was considered but price put me off (and I didn't really want to become yet another Apple prophet! ).


My primary usage is going to be mobile coding/development and non-professional video editing so, for me, it's more about performance, price, build quality, style, battery and weight. I can compromise on the display and the graphics card.


So, reasons for the post, well:

1) Even the Sony Viao SE has it's complaints about it's "perfect" screen

2) Can anyone tell me if the S7 supports hardware virtualisation/virtualization? I expect it's a yes, but sometimes it's disabled/unavailable in the bios (was with some of the Sony's) and I don't want a nasty surprise. Could somebody please try and confirm?

3) My plan is to strip the laptop of it's OS and bloatware, but I don't want to lose any of the benefits of the Samsung software/caching etc. Can I format the whole thing and reinstall the Samsung software on it's own with my own copy of MS Windows 7 Ultimate? Have Samsung done any tinkering to optimise/optimize performance within Windows 7 Home that I will lose by a fresh install?

4) Has anyone seen any nice laptop bags and/or sleeves for the S7? - preferably black and/or orange flashes. I presume that most 15'' bags/sleeves will suffice for the S7?

Thanks in advance!

 

Reviews exist because it's not always practical for everyone to go out and look at every single product that they might be interested in. Experimental measurements, when not manipulated for propaganda purposes (such as on manufacturer spec sheets), are not meaningless and do convey valuable information. If you're advocating understanding what a measurement actually measures before making a decision based on its actual numerical value, then I agree. But IMO, it's unwise to slag off the usefulness of objective, quantitative measurements, especially since they can reveal issues that may not be immediately apparent during a test drive at the store under uncontrolled conditions.

 

For 1k-1,2k euros just what is the "superior" product you would recommend then, that fits this laptop category ??

 

If you mean ~15-16" laptops with very good screens: Macbook Pro, Sony F, Sony SE, Dell XPS 15(z) can have very good screens. HP has some laptops that can have the dream color screen but I don't know it that fits the price range you mentioned.

All of them are different laptops though with very different attributes.

And I probably forgot a few other ones.

 

Any word on where people can buy or check out this laptop in Canada? more specifically someplace in Ontario?

 

I'm afraid the mac pro 15 starts at 1800 euros, drifts too far in budget, the sony Se and xps 15z are still on my list of possibilities, but the hardware suffers.
I guess it will boil down to screen vs hardware and battery life.

 

Maybe a bit cheaper. The 15" MBP with Quad core starts at 1449,- Notebooks & Tablets/Notebooks Apple, ab 15", bis 16.9" | Geizhals.at EU
Often on Ebay even cheaper (ElectronicKing for example).

Then there are student discounts (if you know someone that studies) and lower prices in the US (maybe you know someone that travels often).

In my experience Macbook Pros hold their value better then Windows notebooks. If you look at it from a TCO point of view Apple isn't that expensive in my opinion.

 

Dabs.ie have been in touch. They contacted Samsung and I can confirm that the S01UK comes with a 6750m and not a 6490m. I'm sticking with my purchase considering I got €90 off to make it 999. That's remarkable considering Ireland and the UK usually get the highest prices.

 

Yeap but if you select the 15" mac and add up the missing RAM / anti gloss / hard drive rpms compared to match the chronos you end up well over the 2000€/$ price point and still have no "express cache or free VGA adapter". Not to mention the windows you'll have to pay if you still want to use it.

Anyway I won't be surprised if by december the second or third batch of chronos will come with slightly or 300nit+ "better screens" the "pile of lower screens they need to get rid of" theory is a good one. And you always know that early adopters pay the price of various defects.

 

Hi

ok i went back to PC world, this time armed with HD samples, scenery, films etc. The Pc world staff said its ok and i could test the screen, we did a side by side comparison to a Sony Screen and Asus one. Without me saying anything, i asked them what they thought and all responded the screen doesnt look that great, washed out and blacks are not defiantely not black. Sony looked spot on as did the asus, samsung looked bad. I truly hope the higher spec Chronos 7 ( which hasnt been released in uk as of yet) has a better screen than the PC world one, For me its a no go for now, i need to see the higher spec version screen, cant speak for everyone , but the screen is important feature for me.

N.B.. i notice alot of people are saying its no big deal , i suggest to all potential buyers to go out and see this machine for yourself, dont just buy into this 'its ok, live with it' total nonsense.. its your hard earned money , you have a right to be statisfied and not put up with second best.

 

Could say the same about the "better screen" competitor's second best build quality, battery life, hard drive performance, gpu or cpu... etc... It's sad to say but at this price point it seems you can't have it all and indeed have to live with it.

 

Can you please tell us the models ? The brand itself is too vague for a comparison.

 

@saintfury:

Which Sony and which ASUS did you compare it to?

I like my Sony SE screen... but people don't like the color presentation (reds look orange). Not really an issue for me as I don't do graphic editing... but I can see it as an issue for those with that kind of work.

 

Hi

Ok ..try my best to recall , im 100% sure of the asus model , it came with a mini subwoofer ASUS N55SF-S2276V. And the sony i think ( im not 100% sure , but it was Black with 16 inch screen , price looks right) a SONY Vaio VPCF23N1E/B.CEK. Basically the SAMSUNG Series 7 NP700Z5A-A01DX 15.6" Laptop was plonked between these 2 models , so for the sake of convience and not to be a pain , we tested these.

Derpderp..this laptop nearly had it all , the screen failed IMHO. I dont need to live with it , samsung need to, They have lost a customer.

 

Could someone tell if the S02 version with the i5 processor comes with the 6750 graphics card?