BenQ Joybook R45

BenQ in India is a name that one normally associates with LCD panels and peripherals such as ODDs. Their presence in the laptop market, a very lucrative segment, in India is fairly limited with just the occasional 'Joybook' showing up in the public eye. One such laptop, the R45 was introduced earlier this year and is the product we are reviewing today.

Being a 14.1 inch laptop, the R45 is a fairly stout laptop with dimensions of 340 x 246 x 27mm and its weight of 3 kilograms. Its physical construction is fairly sound, with the base material used in the manufacture being of a nice sturdy nature. The only downside here is that the hinges of the laptop are ordinary in their design and to our horror were emitting audible squeaks after just a couple of days of use. We hope this was a problem with our test piece and not an inherent design problem.

Moving on, the keyboard of the R45 is a fairly pleasant affair to work with. Though the keys are of a standard black matte finish, they are well spaced out and offer excellent feedback. Though they are not made to be soft to the touch, they feel very similar to them and hence offer a great typing experience. We spent a few hours on the laptop and did not suffer from the normal “broken hand syndrome” that many laptops can cause with badly designed keyboards. The touchpad of the R45 in a similar vein is well made. It is fairly large in size, allowing for easy mouse manipulation along with the single-tab oversized mouse button key.

The LCD panel of the R45 is a 14.1-inch affair with a native resolution of 1280x800. It supports BenQ’s UltraVivid technology, with DBEF (Display Brilliance Enhancement Film) technology, which is a whole lot of marketing speak for enhanced brightness, color and contrast levels. The technology certainly works as advertised as the LCD panel offers some very vivid colors, eye-splitting brightness and very good contrast ratios. There is however a direct fall-out of this. Any video stream that is not HD, immediately looks very bad and in case of low-scale video content like Youtube can make the video look so bad that it gets irritating very quickly.