HP's Specter 15 makes 4K on a laptop a real experience

The new HP Specter 15 is a rare marriage between an ultra-high-resolution screen and a thin bezel. What makes it better than other 4K laptops is its decent battery life and healthy port selection. If Windows is your jam and you want a screen full If you need size, this is the notebook for you.

The latest iteration of the 15-inch Specter x360 is only offered with a 4k (3840 x 2160 pixels) display. HP strives to deliver an ultra-high-resolution experience. But a 4K display on a 15-inch laptop often goes up Cost of battery life and processing power, which makes thinness and battery life difficult. But not with this kit from HP. The Specter x360 is thin, powerful, loaded with ports and has a beautiful 4K touchscreen.

Life with the Specter X360

The Specter 15 is my favorite 15-inch touchscreen Windows device available today. This notebook follows the tried and true formula. Not without an explanation, though: Inspirations for the updated 15-inch model can easily be traced back to those of the last year 13-inch version released and tested, on positive notes. It's a good blueprint: a machined-aluminum chassis that weighs 4.4 pounds and measures 14 x 8.9 x 0.7 inches.

Now, moving on to the Quadfecta acronym of CPU, GPU, RAM, and SSD. This particular Specter uses a 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7-7500U processor (3.5GHz TurboBoost, 4MB cache), an NVIDIA GeForce 940MX graphics card (2 GB GDDR5, dedicated), 16 GB RAM (at 2133 MHz) and a 512 GB PCIe solid state drive (on the latest NVMe specification).

In other words, performance is buttery smooth (especially when you remove bundled apps) with decent data transfer speeds and enough graphics power to see you through 4K video or a League of Legends game.

Despite being a larger system, the keyboard layout remains almost the same as the 13-inch model, but fortunately doesn't feel terribly cramped. It's mechanical and offers enough travel for new users to easily get used to. This is an island style departure from Keys and while it's not my favorite I could learn to live with it.

The touchpad is wide (which is great), but much shorter from top to bottom than I would like. If I had to single out what I liked least about the Specter 15, it would be the keyboard/touchpad combo.

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Minor oddities with the touchpad and keyboard are minor: the backlit keyboard still offers excellent travel, as well as plenty of touchpad sensitivity and cursor speed options that make it much more enjoyable and smooth to use. Everything else was great otherwise.

The main highlight of this laptop will be its screen. The 15.6″ 4K WLED panel is equipped with a 360 degree hinge, so it is useful to know even if you never orient your screen at a 180 degree angle ( or use it in "tent mode") you still have a 4K panel to watch.

The main question - depending on your needs and personal preference - is whether or not the extra pixels are worth it?

Aside from a Macbook Pro 15″ with a touch bar, the difference in resolution is obvious on paper – 2880 x 1800 on the Retina versus 3,840 x 2,160 on the Specter – but in everyday web use, document creation, multimedia consumption, the Projection etc found little difference. There is also the discussion of user interface scaling with high resolutions that Macs have done better than most Windows machines; that's for another post.

But in reality, this 4K screen isn't color corrected, nor does it conform to Adobe color gamut standards, so it's not an editor's display.

Maybe, like me, you're happy to have extra pixels to work with in Photoshop or Lightroom, and even more happy that your system doesn't freeze when rendering. But the reality is that this 4K screen isn't color corrected, nor does it match Adobe Colorbar standards, so this is not an editor's display.

Of course, with specs like this, the main concern is battery life. A 6-cell, 79.2 Wh battery delivers enough juice to easily exceed the 6-hour mark for internet tasks, even eight hours with conservative use. It won't break any battery life records in the 15-inch category, but it gets away with it despite always pushing a 4K screen. That's impressive.

Audio is flat-tuned. Bang & Olufsen's quad speakers can be tweaked via an included app and, at higher levels, are more than enough to fill a small room or be the source of entertainment for a small gathering of two to four friends overall, it produces loud sounds that can have depth, with a touch of bass.

Don't call it a pen

This is by no means a first, but HP includes an active stylus with every new 15-inch Specter. It's not your average display pen either; it's metal, connects via Bluetooth, includes two function keys, and almost matches the chassis -Finish. In other words, it's actually worth something.

If you're venturing outside of the traditional clamshell form into tablet or tent mode and/or want to try some drawing or precision typing, then this is a welcome giveaway.

Out of the box, the current capacity isn't that useful, so I'd wait for the upcoming Windows Creator update, which will add creative apps and even better active stylus integration. This means your freebie active stylus has a higher calling has as soon as Microsoft releases the update.

bottom line

If you have a catalog of things you want to check out in 4K but are also in the market for a new Windows laptop, then the Specter 15 x360 is for you.

If you don't need the larger screen and inferior battery life, but still want the HP engineered design, go for the smaller Specter 13.

The everyday consumer doesn't really need 4K in everyday life, while others might clamor for its aggressive sharpness and clarity. If you don't want the larger 4K screen and inferior battery life, opt for the smaller Specter 13.

Price in test: $1,569 at HP