Our Samsung R519 Review
Samsung R519
Samsung is a name typically associated with great multimedia products, so it should come as a total surprise to... absolutely nobody at all, that even their budget laptops, like the Samsung R519, are totally capable, handy little multimedia rigs.
The first thing you’ll notice with a piece like this one is the fifteen point six inch screen. It’s nice and colourful, for starters. Most of us are so used to seeing those grayish tones on our laptops that the rainbow brightness of these colours may throw you off at first. Try popping in a Pixar movie just to see what we mean. It’s like computing on a bowl full of M&Ms. The colours are crisp and juicy, and the blacks are a nice, rich black. All in widescreen, too.
Samsung R519 back
But, okay, it’s not a TV set, it’s a laptop, so that’s really only the first impression.
The graphics card is perfect for DVDs, but... you won’t be able to play many recent games without an upgrade. If that’s not an issue, if you have a gaming rig at home or you’re just not a gamer, then the graphics card can do just about anything else, just don’t expect Left 4 Dead 2 to run like a beaut’ and you’ll be fine.
The battery life runs about three hours between charges, which really isn’t bad. What’s kind of odd, however, is that you only get 2048 megs of memory. This is strange when you consider that this memory is running on a dual-core chip 2.16GHz Intel Pentium. You’ll get multi-tasking, but you won’t want to leave say, six or seven programs open at a time, or you’ll feel the rig start to buckle under the strain.
You get a 250 gig hard drive, which is becoming more and more standard these days, and you get tri format DVD rewriting. You also get a flash memory card, and wireless networking with 802.11g WiFi, 10/100 Ethernet and... well, no Bluetooth. Three USB ports on the left hand side, a VGA cable (though no HDMI), and a nice, clicky keyboard with a solid overall build.
We don’t mean to harsh on it, because it really isn’t a bad little rig. In fact, for what it is, it’s really not bad at all. You get a nice big screen and a fairly powerful system. It’s perfect for multimedia, sans gaming, and it can handle just about everything else okay. However, you may either want to spend a little more for a true premium, or spend a little less for a mini.
