Toshiba has announced the launch of the world’s first glasses-free 3D laptop, the Toshiba Qosmio F750 3D and Pocket-lint was on hand to check it out at the rather subdued UK launch.
The new £1300 laptop that’s out in August will sport a 15.6-inch (1366 x 768) resolution screen that promises to deliver a 3D picture without the need to wear clumsy glasses - something that’s rather annoying Toshiba tells us - even though it’s got glasses-only models still on sale.
Still, those little details aside, the new, big, and rather shiny looking laptop will offer you virtually everything you want from a laptop unless you're planning on carrying it around, at which point your back is unlikely to thank you.
The F750 weighs 2.8kg and measures 37.6mm thick, 380.5mm wide and 254mm deep.
Specs include a Core i7 processor, graphics from the Nvidia GeForce 540M, 640GB hard drive, and a Blu-ray XL drive - a new addition to the Blu-ray family that lets you create your own disks with 100GB of stuff.
But what of the 3D? Well we tried the new glasses-less screen with three different types of content at the launch in a dark room. The first was Disney’s Tangled in Blu-ray 3D, the second was Monsters Inc DVD upscalled from 2D to 3D (a feature the Toshiba F750 offers), and the third was promotional clips from Toshiba of a dude doing parkour and some plants looking three dimensional.
The 3D technology works by tracking your face via the included webcam and then working out where you are to best align the 3D image. It’s not a lenticular lens, neither is it parallax; two 3D glasses-free technologies that are being used by companies like Nintendo, LG, and HTC.
While we acknowledge that the three models we played with were prototypes, sadly we are pretty unimpressed with the results.
3D was present, but gave us plenty of ghosting (two images layered over each other) and any movement of your head meant the effect shifted briefly giving further distortion. If you’re planning on watching this on a train, forget it.
As for the 2D to 3D conversion it was barely recognisable, and certainly not worth the bother.
The promotional clips were better, still images especially, but by no means added to the overall experience.
Our hands-on left us feeling very disappointed.
Don’t get us wrong here, we aren’t slating 3D as a medium (we spent the weekend watching Wimbledon in 3D on our television wearing glasses), but from what we’ve seen at the UK launch event from Toshiba we aren’t impressed by the Toshiba F750 3D’s capabilities when it comes to 3D.
Sadly we weren’t able to test or play with other elements of the laptop so can’t rate performance at this time.
Full specs of the Toshiba F750 3D are:
- 39.6cm (15.6-inch) Full HD (1920 x 1080) glasses-free 3D display (120Hz) HD web camera with eye tracking technology
- Intel CoreTM i7 processor (2.00/2.90GHz Turbo) 1.333MHz
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M graphics (up to 2GB)
- 640GB (5400rpm) SATA hard disk drive
- 6GB DDR3 (1333MHz) RAM
- Blu-ray XL re-recordable drive
- Windows 7 64bit Home Premium
- NVIDIA N12P-GS 2GB(DDR3)
- Harman Kardon stereo speakers, Dolby Advanced Audio HDMI-CEC, Multi-Card Reader
- Wi-Fi 802.11(b/g/n), Bluetooth® 3.0 + HS
- 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0 with USB Sleep-and-Charge, Sleep-and-Music