Toshiba Satellite C75-A-13N review

The Toshiba Satellite C75-A-13N is a large 17.3in desktop replacement that gives you plenty of space to work on. It’s rather chunky, measuring 31mm when closed and weighing a hefty 2.7kg, but this is a surprisingly capable laptop that packs a harder punch than most of its similarly-priced rivals.

This is due to its 2.4GHz Intel Core i3-4000M processor, which is one of the newest models in Intel’s mobile range of processors. These are more powerful than the more common and energy efficient U models you tend to find in most budget laptops, and it certainly showed in our multimedia benchmarks. Paired with 8GB of RAM, the C75-A-13N scored a highly respectable 41 overall, which is just a five points behind a modern Core i5 Ultrabook. This is great for its price and it’s more than enough speed for everyday office tasks.

The C75-A-13N’s processor also comes with the more advanced Intel HD Graphics 4600 chip. It’s not quite powerful enough to play games on their highest settings, though, as it only just managed 17.5fps in our Dirt Showdown test on High quality at a 1,280×720 resolution. This isn’t fast enough to play games at a comfortable speed, but you should still be able to play most 3D titles if you lower the detail settings. For instance, we saw a much smoother 34.1fps when we re-ran the test on Low quality at its native resolution of 1,600×900 and disabled the anti-aliasing, which was much more playable.

The laptop has a good range of ports. We were a little disappointed that only one of its three USB ports was the faster USB3 type, but you also get VGA and HDMI video outputs for connecting the laptop to an external display, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a DVD optical drive, a multi-format card reader and separate headphone and microphone jacks. It also has a 1TB hard disk for storing your files.

The C75-A-13N’s colour accuracy was surprisingly good for a laptop of this price as our colour calibrator showed its screen was displaying an excellent 75.5 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is above average for a laptop of this price as we normally only see colour accuracy scores of around 60 per cent on budget systems.

It made all the difference to our solid colour image tests, as our reds, greens and blues all looked rich and deep onscreen. Our solid blacks weren’t quite so impressive, though, as we not only recorded a high black level of 0.77cd/m2, which made blacks appear almost grey, but they also revealed that the lower half of the screen was much lighter than the top half. This wasn’t too noticeable on a day to day basis, but it became particularly distracting when watching films and browsing through photos.

This is a common problem on laptops of this price, but the screen’s mediocre contrast levels didn’t help either. We measured a contrast ratio of just 307:1 with our colour calibrator, and this meant our high contrast test photos weren’t as detailed as normal. Areas of deep shadow often appeared as simple patches of solid black and the screen’s narrow viewing angles made it particularly difficult to get a clear view when we tilted to lid back.