Toshiba Satellite L855-148 review

We weren’t so keen on the L855-148’s glossy display. This suffered badly from overhead reflections, but there’s plenty of screen tilt to help remedy this problem. The keyboard’s black glossy finish means it will also pick up fingerprints, but the rest of the laptop’s brushed aluminium finish looks classy and doesn’t suffer from the same problem. Around the base of the laptop you get the usual connectivity options, including VGA and HDMI outputs to connect to an external display, one USB and two USB2 ports and an SDXC card reader to copy photos from your camera. You also get Gigabit Ethernet, which is useful for super-fast file transfers over your home network.

The icing on the cake would have been a full HD display, but sadly the L855-148 has to settle for the usual 1366×768 resolution. The glossy finish may cause problems with reflections, but the positive side is that such displays tend to give colours added vibrancy and punch. The L855-148’s display is also bright, but this doesn’t come at the expense of contrast; we saw plenty of detail in both light and dark areas of our test images. Laptop screens keep getting better, and this is another impressive example.

Toshiba’s L855-148 is an excellent machine which goes to show how much laptop you can have for your money if you just fancy a traditional keyboard, touchpad and screen rather than a fancy touchscreen or convertible tablet. It may not have fantastic battery life, but the L855-148 proved itself more than capable of handling anything we threw at it, making it by far one of the best laptops out there in its price range. It wins our Best Buy award.