The combination of a TV tuner and a Blu-ray reader sets you up nicely to enjoy a wide variety of entertainment, but there are still a few important things to remember.
What are entertainment notebooks?
Entertainment notebooks are notebooks that feature the combination of a TV tuner and a Blu-ray player or Blu-ray burner. They are for people who need good overall functionality but also want a notebook with plenty of extra media functionality needed for entertainment.
Why would you want an entertainment notebook?
You’d be interested in an entertainment notebook if you want to watch Blu-ray movies and TV on a notebook, and also if you want to record TV directly onto your notebook. Furthermore, you’d want the functionality just listed while still having specs equivalent to an allrounder so running intensive programs like video encoders won’t be an issue.
Why you would not want an entertainment notebook?
If the combination of a TV tuner and a Blu-ray player or Blu-ray burner is unimportant to you either because you don’t want that functionality or have it in other devices, there’s not much an entertainment notebook will offer. Also, if portability is an issue then these notebooks will also be problematic, because they’re generally heavy even compared to similarly sized allrounder notebooks.
What are the specs?
Apart from a TV tuner, entertainment notebooks have either Blu-ray players or Blu-ray burners. They tend to also have hard disk drives of 640GB or larger, with some models have over 1,000GB hard disk drives. Screens are between 15.6in to 18.4in and range in resolution from 1,366x768 all the way up to Full HD. Some are 3D as well, but they’re few and far between. Otherwise entertainment notebooks tend to have Sandy Bridge Intel Core i7s and reasonably strong graphics cards like the NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M.
Conclusion
Entertainment notebooks are remarkably versatile products that have specialized without sacrificing the solid allrounder notebook foundation they start with.
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