Sony Vaio A790 notebook for HDV?

rique wrote on 6/28/2005, 12:08 AM

Any opinions on the suitability of this laptop for HDV editing w/Vegas6 and monitoring/recording with DV Rack w/ HDV plugin?

The specs mostly look good, especially the 1920x1200 monitor but the 5400 hard drive has me wondering and I'm not real clear on the processor: in another thread someone said a 2Ghz Pentium M chip is the equivalent of a 3+ Ghz Pentium 4. True? Battery life is another consideration.

Any thoughts? Informed opinions? Just plain speculation?

Any other laptops you'd recommend in its place?

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/28/2005, 12:23 AM

The Centrino's make me nervous, only because I've had two laptops with difficulties, but the M series procs seem to be great, and that is quite a nice machine in terms of specs. No experience with it, but buy it from an authorized dealer, run the Rack demo on it, and see what happens. If it fails, you can always return it. My partner is running Rack on his 505 with a Centrino, and it works great, and is much slower than the machine you're looking at.
Don't worry about the 5400 drive. You'll not be doing HDV from the system drive anyway, will you? I surely wouldn't.
Laptops can do HDV just fine with the CineForm codec or DV proxy, but you'll still want to be using a second drive for best results and reasonable render times, IMO.