Vaio products were at the cutting edge of what was technically possible for a glorious decade. They made Ultrabooks years before Intel coined that name. They made handheld Windows PCs that really did fit in the palm of your hand before the iPhone and smartphone wave hit. As was the penchant for Japanese technology, making it smaller yet extremely capable was the mantra. Of course, price didn't quite go out the window, but these products were always expensive. People paid because the products were "like no other" as Sony once said in their marketing tag line. Like Apple, they sat at the top of the food chain, and in fact Steve Jobs said Sony products had inspired him back in the good old days. Somewhere along the way Sony's vision for the Vaio line faltered as quarterly results became more important than innovation, and Vaios became run of the mill laptops with too much bloatware and lower price tags. Sony still launched a few novel convertible notebooks like the Vaio Duo and the short-lived but actually quite good Vaio Flip, but the bulk of the line had lost inspiration. In 2014 Sony sold their Vaio PC business and Vaio brand to Japan Industrial Partners, a privately held investment firm, while keeping a 5% stake in the new company and continuing to sell Vaio PCs in Japan via the Sony website. 250 to 300 Sony staff went to work for the new firm, including the R&D folks, giving us hope that the Vaio philosophy of quality and high end design might live on. JIP said they'd sell Vaio laptops in Japan first, and consider returning to the US market. The Vaio Z Canvas is their first US product, and it's been on sale in Japan for several months. This is the Vaio that clearly signals the return of the greatness that the brand offered in its heyday. It has everything you could want in a powerful Windows tablet or 2-in-1 convertible, and I mean everything (except dedicated graphics). This sort of engineering is something only the old Sony could pull off--put a powerful 15" quad core laptop into a 12.5" slim tablet. As you might guess, you can have it all, but that comes at a price. This is an expensive product that Vaio is marketing to professional graphics and artist types. Video editors too, thanks to that crazy quad core i7 CPU and fairly powerful Intel Iris Pro graphics. The base model is $2,199, and the mid level configuration is $2,599 while the top model is a mind-boggling $3,099. As the also aspirational but less well-equipped Microsoft Surface Book shows us, these sort of products aren't cheap to build (though I suspect Microsoft's margins are considerably higher than Vaio's). Still, I'm glad someone is taking the chance on these low volume, high end products because they push the tech envelope forward. Some day faster CPUs, more ports and more colorful displays with pens will become more affordable... until then, they'll be boutique products or required tools of the trade, depending on your needs and budget. Design, Ports and Keyboard The Vaio Z Canvas is housed in a unibody anodized aluminum casing that's carved out, much like the MacBook Pro. It feels premium and is extremely rigid, though it's not particularly thin. Vaio couldn't make it insanely thin and still have room for a healthy set of full size ports: two USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, 3.5mm audio, an SD card slot, Gigabit Ethernet and a mini DisplayPort. That's a better selection of ports than you'll find on quite a few 13.3" Ultrabooks! We're impressed that Sony found room for these along with the quad core CPU and a beefy battery. The rear stand is a thing of engineering beauty. It's a pop-down hinge that provides just the right amount of resistance to hold the Z Canvas at any angle you wish with minimal bounce. Just push it to the angle you like, even a low angle for drawing and it stays in place. This is the first time I've seen this sort of hinge and it's done to perfection. It's a center stand though, so it won't work for resting on the legs as does Surface Pro 4 (it will sit between your legs). At 2.67 lbs. this isn't a light tablet. Surface Pro 4 and the "clipboard" section of Surface Book weigh 1.6 lbs., as does the Toshiba Portege WT20 12.5" Windows tablet. That's the price we pay for the quad core CPU, big battery, hearty build and large selection of ports. It's best used resting on a table or stand when drawing and writing at length. The included keyboard weighs 0.75 lbs. and is extremely thin yet rigid thanks to the aluminum back that acts as a cover for the tablet. It looks like a regular notebook when the cover is in place and it doesn't wobble or come loose as did the keyboard cover on the similarly designed Sony Vaio Tap 11. The keyboard has short but not unlivable travel (more than the 12" MacBook and similar to the Surface Book). The island style keyboard is tactile and quiet. It's actually easy to use and I typed this review on it with great accuracy. It's not backlit though--and that's a shame. The keyboard has a slider switch with 3 positions: off, on and trackpad off. That trackpad is fairly large and works better than many Windows trackpads. The keyboard uses wireless (RF) and isn't physically connected to the tablet except when charging: place it as a cover on the tablet and 2 charging pins connect to keep the keyboard juiced. It has a micro USB port should you need to charge the keyboard separately, but wireless keyboards usually go for a week or more on a charge. Note that our unit's keyboard actually drained when left attached in the charging position for a day; we hope that's a defect with our unit or a bug that will be ironed out. The pen clips onto the tablet's side via a magnet (Vaio beat Microsoft to that idea), and it's not hard to knock it off. Thus Vaio includes a pen holder you can mount in that magnetic slot if you want a more secure way to hold the pen in place. They also include a firm foam wrap that slides over the grip area of the pen if you prefer a cushy pen grip. Wide Color Gamut Display This is one of the Vaio's crown jewels. The 2560 x 1704 IPS 12.3" display is simply stunning and it's pre-calibrated at the factory. It has an unusually wide color gamut of 96% Adobe RGB as measured by our Spyder Pro 4 colorimeter (Vaio claims 95%). High end laptops and tablets typically cover %95 of the lesser sRGB gamut and 75% of Adobe RGB. The color gamut and excellent factory calibration are perfect for graphics pros and photographers who require color fidelity. For those who aren't graphics professionals, movies and photos look absolutely stunning. Text is crisp thanks to a good 570:1 contrast ratio. Our colorimeter had trouble measuring the brightness of this Panasonic-made display. It rated the display at 250 nits, but to my eye it looks brighter. This is a glossy display as are nearly all touch screens, but it has a 3:2 aspect ratio, unlike most laptops and tablets except the MS Surface line. That makes it less awkward to use in portrait mode. N-Trig Pen Like Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, the Vaio Z Canvas uses the latest generation N-Trig active digitizer with 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity vs. 256 levels on older Surface Pro and Vaio models. That means more natural drawing (note takers probably won't notice) and the digital ink flows in a more fluid or silky way. Diagonal line jitter is reduced and pen hover distance has increased to around .7", which is a bit less than Wacom (some Wacom tablets reach 1"). Pen hover is handy for pointing without touching the screen and more importantly so that the screen "sees" the pen, and knows when to ignore your hand when you rest it on the screen (this is called palm rejection). The tablet ships with the same Vaio-branded DuoSense 2 pen as the final generation Sony Vaio Duo 13 and optionally with the Vaio Flip models. It has two side buttons, and a slightly rough and soft nib that's not too noisy on the glass. It doesn't have the eraser on the end as does the new pen included with Microsoft's Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, but you can use that pen with the Vaio and the eraser function will work. How does the Vaio Z Canvas feel for writing and drawing compared to the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book? Very similar, and that's not a surprise since I suspect they're using similar if not the same technology. The pen works in all programs and you'll get pressure sensitivity in programs that support modern Windows Ink APIs (many programs do, including OneNote and Adobe CC apps). In case you're using a legacy app that requires WinTab, you can install the MS Surface Pro 3 WinTab package available on Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 support pages (Microsoft bought N-Trig). I tested WinTab with a few art programs and it worked like a charm.

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