4K has arrived; 4K has a long way to go. The next standard in TV and monitor resolutions has started to trickle into electronics showrooms, hoping to tantalize shoppers into taking a very, very high-res plunge, but the resolution standard doesn't come with much to watch.

Specs at a glance: Toshiba P50t-BST2N01 Screen 3840×2160 at 15.6" (282 ppi) OS Windows 8.1 64-bit CPU 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700HQ RAM 16GB 1600MHz DDR3L (two slots, 16GB max) GPU AMD Radeon R9 M265X with 2GB dedicated GDDR5 memory, Intel HD Graphics 4600 (integrated) HDD 1TB hybrid drive with 8GB NAND flash Networking Dual-band 802.11agn, Bluetooth 4.0 Optical Pre-built DVD SuperMulti drive (Blu-ray rewriteable drive available in alternate fixed configuration) Ports 4x USB 3.0, HDMI, card reader, headphone jack, microphone jack Size 14.9 × 9.6 × 1.1" Weight 5.2 lbs Battery 4-cell Li-polymer Warranty 1 year Starting price $1,799.99 Other perks Webcam, Technicolor specification, multi-touch display, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5

Just as 3D TVs and monitors had a tough enough time getting our attention, 4K is still hobbled by a severe lack of content in its 3840×2160 resolution. TV buyers may lose interest once they burn through the limited films and series available on smart sets' download and streaming services. Computer users, however, have had more reasons to tiptoe toward the quadrupling of 1080p—at the very least, to enjoy super-crisp text and details in their regular work and browsing.

Displays as dense as 2880×1800 and 3200×1800 have already landed in our laps, but Toshiba has come out as the first legitimate 4K laptop producer. The P50t Satellite's biggest selling point is its 15.6", 3840x2160 resolution screen—a multi-touch panel, at that—and it's backed with the specs you'd expect from a machine forced to render so many pixels.

Without a 4K media landscape to latch onto, however, Toshiba instead has to position this device as a creative tool. Nothing else on the market offers such a straight, portable path to 4K media production, and features like automatic "Technicolor" monitor calibration, a 1TB hybrid hard drive, and 16GB of RAM put this device squarely in the camp of "get photos and video done," not just "enjoy Kevin Spacey's high-res face."

Had Toshiba succeeded in putting out the productivity red carpet, the P50t's biggest issues—weight, bulk, looks, heat, dimness, trackpad, battery, gaming performance—might melt away. Unfortunately, those problems make it harder for us to excuse a central complaint: that this potential all-in-one portal to 4K media production has launched as a wild-west, "you figure it out" device.

Technicolor dreamcoat

The screen, naturally, is the starting point for any P50t review, and it's easy to praise, so long as you view it in a dark room. We found ourselves squinting too often when we opened the laptop at sunny coffee shops, so we measured its maximum brightness, and the resulting reading was pretty dim: 215 cd/m^2. No wonder we kept reaching for the "increase brightness" button, only to find we'd already maxed out.

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

In a standard office, the brightness issue is tolerable, and the screen impresses plenty from that point on. It's easy enough to gush over video with such pixel density; Toshiba pre-loaded a video full of cityscapes and nature scenes, including a hot-air balloon pavilion and a super-zoomed, slow-motion shot of a snowy owl. The montage repeatedly dropped jaws.

Is such resolution wasted on a 15.6" screen? At least on a laptop, our eyes are close enough to the screen to appreciate the fidelity, and considering how many pixel-rich 13" screens we've seen hit the market recently, it's not insane to see 4K stretch over something a little over two inches bigger. The 4K results definitely made me want to see slower, detail-rich series like Planet Earth re-released in 4K resolution. For less optimized content, Web browsing upscaled with little incident, and when I watched higher-speed 1080p videos on the Toshiba, I didn't feel any upscaling repulsion.

That might be because of the other tricks up the screen's sleeve. Backlight balance is mostly even, as testing revealed only a slight flare of light in our review unit's top-left corner—which we honestly wouldn't have noticed in regular use—while true blacks and color balance proved very impressive, even when movie content was compared between a calibrated HDTV and Toshiba's default settings. Those settings, by the way, are labeled as "Technicolor certified," and that color-balance standard can be triggered with a click of preinstalled ChromaTune software.

That's all good news for the primary productivity app that comes preinstalled: Photoshop Lightroom 5. The program is already a capable companion for any shutter-crazy photographer, and between the high resolution, large screen, and simple color-calibration tools, you get quite the case study for this laptop's potential. Giant photos from a Canon T3i loaded into the app very quickly, and the large screen real estate made examining photo pixels at a 3:1 ratio a cinch. Plus, it didn't hurt to hit the program's "auto" light balance button for a photo, then walk outside and hold the P50t screen up to the subject and see an identical color recreation.

Weighing on us

By the way, carrying the P50t outside to compare photos to source material was a bit of a pain, thanks to the laptop's considerable heft. Our review unit weighs 5.2 lbs, taking this just outside comfortable-portability range (the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, for reference, is about 4.46 pounds).

Despite the laptop's bulk, it doesn't really sport more ports than comparable laptops. Four USB 3.0 ports are absolutely welcome, and there's also HDMI, Ethernet, microphone, and headphone jacks. We actually didn't notice the laptop's multi-format card reader, flush with the bottom-front of the laptop, until we did a last-minute check of the instruction manual! That's because the reader looks more like a cracked-open imperfection than a clean, intentional slot. Unfortunately, the laptop's HDMI-out is restricted to the old 1.4 standard, which means any 4K output will be limited to 30 frames per second. You would need DisplayPort 1.2 to do 4K output at 60 frames per second, but that's not available here.

Once you find that card reader, you might poke around the bottom of the laptop to find a removable battery; if so, you'll come up empty. In spite of the old-school, bulky design, the battery is non-replaceable, making its nasty 178-minute lifespan (a figure we reached in our standard 50-percent brightness Web browsing test) that much harder to stomach.















Besides the screen, nothing else about the laptop demands a second glance. The brushed aluminum top is only interrupted by a "Toshiba" logo in shiny silver plastic, along with a raised, non-brushed edge lining. The black, plasticky bottom rises on the laptop's sides at an angle, as if to allow the silver portion to mimic how a Macbook Air tapers, but the illusion doesn't work in the slightest. This thing is relatively thick, at 1.1", to make room for the hybrid 1 TB hard drive and the... wait a second... DVD-RW drive?

We looked into the upgrade path for Blu-ray on a P50t, and it exists, but you have to make the choice from the get-go. Toshiba only offers two P50t 4K models, but the Blu-ray model (which, thankfully, includes a rewritable drive) includes 4GB less RAM, a non-hybrid hard drive, and an i7-4710 processor, as opposed to our review model's i7-4700.

That the "budget" pre-built version includes Blu-ray and the higher-end version doesn't has us wondering what Toshiba's smoking over there. If you want the higher-spec P50t, you can't remove or replace the optical drive yourself, leaving you stuck with added bulk and no capacity to watch, let alone burn, any high-res discs on the market. (Not that Blu-ray supports anything beyond 1080p at this point; anything labeled "mastered in 4K" is still just 1080p, so the term is marketing hogwash.)

The device's top lining doesn't just cheapen the laptop's looks. Its dim, unimpressive nature also does a poor job clarifying which side of the lid actually has the hinge (a cheap-looking dual-hinge, by the way, which at least keeps the screen's angle plenty firm). In my weeks of use, I repeatedly tried to open the wrong end of the P50T, as neither side has a latch, indentation, or other finger-friendly indicator, and the incorrect side has a smoother curve. I got used to checking whether the word "Toshiba" was upside down before trying to open it.

The keyboard is almost the exact same size as that of a Macbook Pro, with the addition of a full 10-key pad on the right. The major differentiation is a slight shrinking and clumping of the top function keys, along with an awkward, uncomfortable squishing of the arrow keys.

After adjusting the Synaptics trackpad's sensitivity to my personal tastes, I found it was serviceable as a pointer most of the time, though swipes failed to register occasionally, and it would sometimes crap out mid-drag. Two-finger scrolling, on the other hand, would frequently either not register on first drag or, more commonly, come with noticeable lag. This issue, more than any other, sent me screaming for an external mouse before long.

We immediately disabled the "corner swipes," as our default trackpad use began with a right hand reaching down from the keyboard. That almost always hit the trackpad at its right-most edge, bringing up Windows' charms menu, and mediocre palm rejection meant this situation came up again and again.

Clicking with two fingers anywhere on the top of the trackpad registered as a right-click, but that didn't apply when clicking on the trackpad's bottom, where a line divides left-click and right-click. Users can disable the two-finger click if they want, but they can't adjust the bottom-click divide.