HP juices desktop and mobile workstations

Billions of colors on your lap

At the briefing, HP's DreamColor solutions architect Greg Staten took a few moments to remind his audience of his company's color critical–displays as potential partners to the Z210 CMT and SFF.

The wide-gamut, 30-bit DreamColor LCD displays can support over one billion active colors – 64 times the color capability of run-of-the-mill displays – which HP says essentially eliminates banding or contouring artifacts.

"We've had this display [technology] in release for about two and a half years," Staten said, explaining how the development of the original release came in response to requests from the motion-picture and animation studio DreamWorks.

"DreamWorks came to us and told us that they need to solve a problem: the CRT was going away, and there was not a single LCD from any manufacturer that met their requirements for color-critical work," he said. HP then worked with DreamWorks, along with Disney, Industrial Light and Magic, and others to design a display that was "custom-built for the feature-film, animation, and visual-effects industry."

According to Staten: "Two and a half years later, customers are still telling us that there's nothing else out there" comparable to the DreamColor displays, and that one of the features that customers tout is the greatly increased time between color calibrations due to DreamColor's self-calibrating feature.

"Typically, when they were working in the CRT world, they recalibrated every week," Staten said. One customer, he said, deployed a DreamColor display on a nine-month project, "and when they brought it in after about three thousand hours of use, then measuring with a Photo Research PR-680 – a very high-end spectroradiometer – there was not measurably significant change in the calibration."

Staten's restatement of the DreamColor story was in preparation for the announcement that HP's exisiting EliteBook line of high-end laptops – what HP call mobile workstations – two of which offer an option of that self-correcting, billion-collor, high-gamut display tech.

The EliteBook line will now consist of three laptops mobile workstations: 14-inch, 15.6-inch, and 17.3-inch models, which have "all been redesigned from the ground up," according to Chris Convertito, HP's category manager for performance notebooks.

The new EliteBook line's design has been "cleaned up," according to Convertito, with case elements "aligned in a precision manner," with the multicolored-LED, touch-sensitive controls now replaced by simpler, less-distracting buttons, and with a glass touchpad that's about twice the size of that used in previous EliteBooks.

The 14-inch EliteBook 8460w will have a battery life "in the seven-eight hour range," according to Convertito, but he emphasized that that was an estimate, and not yet an official spec.

The 8460w has an AMD FirePro M3900 graphics card with 1GB of video memory, which Convertito characterized as "entry-level," and it is available with Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processors – though clock speeds were not discussed at the briefing – and will accept memory of up to 16GB.

Ports on the 8460w include two USB 3.0, one USB 2.0 for charging, one eSATA/USB 2.0 combo port, DisplayPort, FireWire 400, RJ-11 modem, RJ-45 Ethernet, plus a docking port and an external battery connector. An HD webcam sits above the display, which can be either 1366-by-768 or 1600-by-900 pixels – but not with DreamColor tech.

Storage options range from 250 to 750GB, and an expansion bay will accept either a secondary hard drive or an optical drive, including Blu-ray. At its most basic configuration, the 8460w weighs 4.9 pounds and costs $1,299.

The 15.6-inch HP EliteBook 8560w ups the top display resolution to 1920-by-1080 pixels. As with the 8460w, the available clock speeds of its Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processors were not discussed, but the memory capacity is increased to 32GB.

Three graphics choices are offered in the 8560w: an AMD FirePro M5950 with 1GB of GDDR5 video memory, and an Nvidia Quadro 1000M and Quadro 2000M, both with 2GB of DDR3 video memory.

The complement of ports on the 8560w are identical to those on the 8460w, and also like the 8460w, it has Gigibit Ethernet plus ExpressCard/54 and SD/MMC slots. Storage options begin at 320GB, with the same expansion bay options.

You can choose to equip the 8560w with a 1920-by-1080 pixel DreamColor display, or either a 1600-by-900 or 1920-by-1080 standard display. At its most basic configuration, the 8560w weighs 6.69 pounds and costs $1,349.

The big boy in the new mobile workstation line is the 17.3-inch HP EliteBook 8760w, which HP says is designed to meet "tough military standards" (MIL-STD 810G) for drop, vibration, dust, altitude, and high temperature.

The 8760w has the same processor and memory specs as does the 8560w, and the same ports and slots as do its two siblings. Graphics options include an AMD FirePro M5959 with 1GB of GDDR5, an Nvidia Quadro 300M and Quadro 400M, each with 2GB of GDDR5, and – beginning in June of this year – an Nvidia Quadro 5010M with 4GB or GDDR5.

You can stuff the 8760w with up to three hard drives, and if you're interested in some data protection, RAID 5 is supported – which HP says is a first for their mobile workstations. As with the 8560w, display options include a 1920-by-1080 pixel DreamColor display, or either a 1600-by-900 or 1920-by-1080 standard display.

In its base 7.55-pound configuration, the 8760w starts at $1,899 and – like the two smaller EliteBooks – is expected to be available in the US in May. ®