Brilliant screen on battery-powered laptop from Zenith

Press, 1 December 1987, Page 54

Brilliant screen on battery-powered laptop from Zenith

GARETH POWELL

Zenith has just released in Australia and New Zealand a new machine which is probably the most successful laptop computer in the world. In the United States it holds a large part of the market share — the claimed figure is 70 per cent, which sounds about as reliable as most other claimed market share figures. Work on the basis, instead, that it’s the market leader. The reason this new machine, the ZlB3, is such a success is that it has a screen so brilliant you can acquire a suntan using it. It redefines the word “legibility” for portables. And yet it still runs off batteries. This is the very first battery-operated laptop to have a screen as brilliant as a standard monitor — a neat and most impressive trick. Some machines are brilliantly but need mains power. If you need a laptop with a brilliant screen then the Toshiba 3100, with its 20 megabyte disk drive, is one way to go. Its orange plasma screen is a delight to work with and it has everything you ever wanted on a full-size computer. I have used one for nearly a year and found it, almost, the perfect machine. But you must connect it to the mains power because the screen, in order to produce its refulgent orange glow, eats power — lots of it. Batteries are simply out of the question. You can have a battery machine with a less than brilliant screen. Most laptops which use batteries have a liquid crystal display screen, which may or may not be readable in a good light. My own view is that standard liquid crystal display screens are only worth using with a 40 character eight-line display such as you find on the NEC 8201A/Tandy 100 push. Eighty characters on such a screen are a great strain on the eyes. The Zenith uses a new form of liquid crystal display, with added backlit super-twistedbirefigentexpi-alidocious technology. This technology is also claimed by almost every other maker in the business, but only Zenith has managed to take it to the stage where the screen is brighter and more readable than on a standard computer. Zenith was originally distributed here by the unfortunately named Anitech, but now Zenith Australia has been set up to oversee distribution. Apart from laptops they have a strong but pricy range of desktop personal computers which are all sadly in need of a total redesign. Ugly is perhaps the wrong word, and “plain” too complimentary. Somewhere in between. They also have one of the best colour monitors available for the PC — a flat screen with dazzling colour which will retail at about $l6OO. But it is the range of laptops which show Zenith computers at its very best. These machines will at last make the long presaged laptop revolution a reality. For nearly two years now it has been all talk and trousers. The laptops were coming. The laptops had arrived. The laptops were sweeping the market. The truth was something rather less than that.

Yes, journalists took to the small battery-operated machines in droves because they precisely suited their line of work. But elsewhere the response was, for some time, spotty. The first machine to make a breakthrough was the Toshiba. It brought serious respectability to the laptop market. Now the Zenith will take it a stage further. >. In the United States these miniature computers have taken off in a big way. This year 374,000 laptops will be sold, according to the market research firm Dataquest. It predicts that the market for laptops (sometimes referred to as kneetops or transportables) will go from SUS2 billion this year to SUSS billion by 1991. Laptop computers will soon be used in business as an alternative to desktop machines, simply because they do not make too much of themselves. They are not puffed up. “The problem with a desktop computer is that once you put it down, you no longer have a desk.” This truism comes from James Cosby, of The Laptop Shop, a store in New York, that sells nothing but laptop computers and appropriate accessories. Besides taking up less space on a desk, a laptop computer is, by definition, portable. Once you are used to travelling with a laptop, it becomes effectively a total electronic office. For example, I simply will not go anywhere — not even to a country property in Molong to look at cattle — unless I have a laptop computer with me. Without one I feel deprived and suffer withdrawal symptoms. The first generation of portables in the early 1980 s wasn’t very portable. Adam Osborne — an Americanised English computer journalist with a more than passing resemblance to Clark Gable — launched the first portable in the form of the Osborne 1. This was roughly the shape and size of a manual sewing machine. You could transport it, but not with great ease. “Luggable” was the descriptive word preferred. The machine was a success, but eventually the Osborne company in America went belly-up, amidst many recriminations and lawsuits. Laptops have come a long way since then. Speeds have increased, the size of memory has gone up, hard disks have been added, and the weight and bulk lowered. But the Achille’s heel of all portable laptops — those that can be used with batteries — has always been the screen. That deficiency has now been brilliantly solved with the new Zenith. Will the laptop eventually replace the desktop machine? I doubt it. I think it’s going too far to agree with Cosby of The Laptop Shop, who claims that laptops are probably going to replace desktops within the next five years. But undoubtedly it has major market possibilities. Note to potential purchasers: The first few Zenith 183 machines being offered on sale in Australia and New Zealand have 10 megabyte disks, but a 20 megabyte version is, even as we speak, being shipped. Do yourself a favour and wait for the larger capacity.