Announced in 2008, HP Pavilion dv4t 14.1-inch entertainment laptop, featuring Intel Centrino 2 mobile platform, known as “Montevina”, is very popular in laptop market. Now, let us have a brief review:

The Pavilion dv4t includes the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and the new GMA X4500 integrated graphics, or Nvidia GeForce 9200M GS 256MB dedicated GPU. The laptop supports up to 4GB of DDR2 memory, up to 320GB of hard drive storage, and a DVD burner or Blu-Ray Disc drive. The 14.1″ 1280×800 widescreen display in this notebook has CCFL or LED backlight.

It also features Altec Lansing stereo speakers, web camera, and fingerprint reader, HDMI and VGA outputs, three USB ports (4th shared with eSATA port), an ExpressCard slot, 5-in-1 media card reader, and Infrared receiver.Here, I’d like to focus its display and speakers:

Display and Speakers:

The HP DV4T sports a superb 14.1″ WXGA LCD display with a native resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. It is a glossy LED backlit display with nice brightness and contrast levels. The vertical viewing angles are a bit acute but should suffice for linear viewing coupled with the adequately wide horizontal viewing angles. The sunlight readability is limited due to the glossy display but with increased brightness, it is atleast legible. The LED backlit display is much more power efficient than normal displays and also a bit thinner. The display isn’t suited for HD movie viewing due to low resolution but you can connect to a HD capable display using the HDMI out. The color reproduction is nice and accurate and the colors are vibrant.

The HP DV4T includes a set of nice speakers with good audio quality. The volume levels it manages are decent too and well above the range of many other laptops. This laptop can easily cater to an audience of about 10 in a small room. You can use headphones if you want to improve the sound quality.

Pros: Fast, easy to use, keyboard is roomy. Does visa, media center, movies, tv and regular business processing very well with no freezes.

Cons: The mouse is a little slippery and the updated sound driver causes the quickstart bar to malfunction.

Conclusion:

The HP DV4T is a nice notebook offering nice specs at an affordable price. It has a very nice display and an excellent selection of ports, but it also does have some shortcomings like getting hot and low battery life. Even then, we think that it makes for a good overall package.