Cube inside...
Technology & You: PORTABLES
DIGITAL VIDEO TO GO
12/29/97
Business Week
Page 18E4
(Copyright 1997 McGraw-Hill, Inc.)
Want the notebook that has everything? Consider the $5,600 Toshiba Tecra 750DVD, the first to hit retail shelves with a built-in digital videodisk ( DVD ) drive. True, there's hardly any computer software available on DVD yet, though the drive also reads standard CD-ROMs. But on a long plane flight, you could plug in your earphones, pop in a disk, and watch a real movie instead of whatever sorry flick the airline is showing. Or, using the laptop's built-in video connections, you could plug it directly into your television set or videocassette recorder, making it a handy, if rather expensive, DVD player.
Aside from the DVD drive, this Toshiba's specifications are the same as the Tecra 750CDT that shipped a couple of months ago: a 233-Mhz Pentium, 32 megabytes of memory, a 4.7-gigabyte hard disk, a built-in 56 kilobits-per- second modem, and a beautiful 13.3-inch high-resolution display. It also includes a tiny video camera that clips to the case, plus Intel Corp.'s VideoPhone conferencing software.
If you do want to use the Tecra 750DVD to watch movies while airborne, you might want to shell out an additional $200 for an extra battery: The digital videodisk drive runs continually while showing a film, making for heavy demand on power. |
