Sony VAIO F Series

We quickly took to the VAIO F’s island keyboard, which combines a sturdy panel with large keys whose satin finish feels soft to the touch.

You get fast performance, solid multimedia features, and a lovely 16.4-inch screen for enjoying HD content.

As one would rightly expect from a Vaio laptop, the display is clear and bright, with decent off-axis viewing.

Right now, the technology is being embedded into select Sony notebooks and cameras, so one could take advantage of TransferJet by either touching two such digital cameras together or, as in this case of the VAIO F Series, placing a TransferJet camera on top of a similarly equipped VAIO laptop.

Like other vendors, such as HP, Sony includes face tracking technology with its webcam, which means the camera will pan and zoom to follow your face, keeping it in focus, as you move around in front of the camera.

The laptop's 1.3-megapixel webcam is standard fare and identical to the one we saw on the previous VAIO F Series earlier this year.

We’d even go so far as to say that the keyboard is as comfortable as the famed keyboards on Apple’s MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Click to enlargeThe VAIO F's large, comfortable keyboard is virtually identical to the previous F series model we enjoyed before.

Above the keyboard is a long speaker grille which subtly blends into the VAIO F's dark gray color scheme.

When we watched Iron Man on Blu-ray, details such as the flames in explosions looked crisp.

For Blu-ray watching, the Corel WinDVD player is also bundled.

The 7,200-rpm hard drive is fast, too; it copied a 4.97GB folder of mixed media at a rate of 29.2 MBps, which beats the category average of 27.5 MBps.

Both of these scores are even faster than what the also-speedy Core i7-powered Aspire 8940G and Studio 17 delivered.

Using Oxelon Media Converter, which harnesses the power of the VAIO F's multi-core CPU, the laptop was able to convert a five-minute MPEG-4 video clip to AVI in a swift 57 seconds.

You’ll get a full HD 16.4-inch display, an Intel Core i7 processor, discrete Nvidia graphics, and Blu-ray playback.