To read my other posts about the Toshiba Qosmio G40 Click Here 

Here is my experience/observations about watching 1080p HD content on the Toshiba Qosmio G40.

Toshiba loaned me the G40 over the Christmas holidays.

Before I get started the issue of the Hi-Definition format war needs to be addressed.

There are two formats HD-DVD and Blu Ray. Until early January 2008 both were competing for consumers. However Warner Bros announced they would be going Blu Ray exclusive from June 2008. This means that 70% of the movie studios support Blu Ray and 30% HD-DVD.

If you are getting into HD in 2008 the smart move format wise is to go Blu Ray (regardless about how your feel about one side or the other).

So in this article I will concentrate on the HD laptop experience.

The Qosmio G40 has a HD-DVD Drive that can playback HD-DVD movies and is also a HD-Writer. I did not have optical media available to test the writing capability of the drive.

Software 

Toshiba provide DVD and HD-DVD playback software, the user interface of this was very neat and understated. The player had an interesting feature of being able to playback DVD/HD-DVD content from the hard disk. This feature isn’t available on other software players for copy protection reasons.

The Qosmio G40 boasts that it’s display is 1080p

All HD-DVD and Blue Ray movies typically have video on the Discs encoded in 1080p format. This is so it looks great on large HD screens.

The key here is large. On a laptop a 17″ screen is large, but in home cinema terms a 17″ display is the complete opposite..tiny.

So is having a 1080p screen on a 17″ laptop meaningful? Yes and No. You need a resolution like 1920×1200 for a 17″ display anyway and this gives you 1080p by default. However even though you are watching 1080p and the quality is amazing a 17″ Screen will never do 1080p HD Content justice. A much larger screen say upwards of 46″ and 1080p begins to shine.

How does Hi-Def compare to DVD?

I got hold of the same movie in both DVD and HD-DVD formats the recent SCI-Fi film Serenity and played sections back to back for comparison.

The first thing you notice about Hi-Def is the sharpness of the image quality.

In layman terms the HD version of the movie has about 3 times the amount of detail.

DVD looks absolutely fine until you compare it to the same source in HD. Then any of your “DVD is fine” arguments go out the window. Mine included.

So HD playback on the Qosmio G40 was fantastic, The screen in the G40 looks amazing especially when playing back HD video.

Connections

I connected the G40 to my 32″ 720p Display using HDMI without a problem. I did the same comparisons between DVD and HD-DVD on this larger display. Naturally HD looked considerably better. In this example I was comparing 720p up scaled DVD to 720p HD-DVD.

I would have liked to see an Coax Out for my digital sound, but I am old fashioned I guess

Conclusion

The Qosmio G40 is about as much fun as you can get for digital media playback.

The combination of a really fast CPU, great video card and fantastic speakers means you never have to compromise with your digital media, the G40 does it all effortlessly.

Official Link: Toshiba Qosmio G40

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 8:17 am and is filed under Equipment Reviews, Hi-Definition, Toshiba, Toshiba Qosmio G40. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.