At Computex 2014, high-res displays are all the rage, with everyone from Gigabyte to MSI and Intel showing off laptops with higher-than-HD screens. ASUS's 15.6-inch ZenBook NX500 laptop is one of the best we've seen, thanks not only to its industry-leading 4K display but to its incredibly vibrant color. We had a chance to spend a few minutes with the NX500 and were blown away by the brilliant images on its display.
On the outside, the NX500 looks alot like ASUS's prior N series notebooks, with an attractive silver-colored aluminum body, accented by the speakers' concentric black dots on either side of the keyboard. At just 0.74 inches, the laptop is relatively thin and its 4.85-pound weight seems reasonable given its size and wealth of high high end components.
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Under the hood, the ZenBook NX500 packs a Core i7 CPU, Nvidia GTX 850M graphics, up to 16GB of RAM and single or dual SSDs with capacities up to 512GB. The laptop carries a full array of ports, including three USB connections, an SD card reader, HDMI and DisplayPort out.
However, you won't buy the NX500 for its looks or its performance. You''ll buy it because of its breathtaking 4K screen, which is capable of displaying 100 percent of the NTSC color gamut, which is also 146 percent of the sRGB gamut. We recently began performing color tests on all the devices that enter our lab and many notebooks can barely crack 70 percent of sRGB, so this is twice as good.
Color gamut and resolution numbers aside, the ZenBook NX500 has the most vibrant display we've ever seen on a notebook. Colors like the green in a towel or the reds and yellows in a pile of fruit looked as real as if they were sitting on a table in front of us.
ASUS put two NX500s next to each other with the one on the left showing 100 percent of the NTSC gamut and the one on the right having been modified to use a smaller color space. The picture of fruit on the right hand display appeared so muted that the strawberry looked a little purple, but the srawberry on the left was a deep red.
The ASUS ZenBook NX500 is due out later this year. We look forward to putting its screen up against our color tests to see if it looks as good in the lab as it did on the show floor.
