Sony officially announces VAIO releases for summer

FZ-Series to offer some pretty "serious technology"

14 May 2007 16:31 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

On the back of Intel's new platform launch, Sony are the latest company to officially announce a new notebook line-up, although Pocket-lint.co.uk has previewed this range, the specs are now official.

The VAIO FZ-Series notebook offers some "serious technology", based on the brand-new Intel Centrino platform, processor choices include the Intel Core 2 Duo Processors T7100 and T7300, and 1GB or 2GB SDRAM depending on the model, with hard disk sizes go up to 200GB.

The series offers a 15.4-inch widescreen X-black LCD display with colour technology from BRAVIA backlight technologies, a NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT notebook GPU, and hardware HD decoding capable of very high bit rate playback for optimum results with HD movies.

The VGN-FZ11Z model has an integral Blu-ray Disc drive while an HDMI output with HDCP completes the HD functionality, providing a single-cable connection to an HD-Ready TV. As well as playing new Blu-ray discs, this drive can also record. The FZ-Series is capable of both editing Full HD video, and playing the results in 1080p Full HD, so it can become your personal HD video editing suite. The highlights tour ends with dedicated AV buttons, an integrated webcam and a magnesium alloy chassis.

In addition to the FZ-Series, Sony's announcement concerned updates to some of their key models all of which will now be available with the new Intel technology.

The Sony VAIO N30 Series will be now also be available in a wider choice of configurations, the professional VAIO BX40 Series has been made even more secure with a fingerprint recognition system while the Blu-ray enabled VAIO AR40-Series with a 17-inch screen is now available with up to a 320GB hard drive.

All pricing and availability TBC.