ASUS ZenBook NX500 Eyes-On: Colorful 4K Display Amazes

At Computex 2014, high-res displays are all the rage, with everyone from Gigabyte to MSI and Intel showing off laptops with higher-than-HD screens. ASUS’s 15.6-inch ZenBook NX500 laptop is one of the best we’ve seen, thanks not only to its industry-leading 4K display but to its incredibly vibrant color. We had a chance to spend a few minutes with the NX500 and were blown away by the brilliant images on its display.
On the outside, the NX500 looks alot like ASUS’s prior N series notebooks, with an attractive silver-colored aluminum body, accented by the speakers’ concentric black dots on either side of the keyboard. At just 0.74 inches, the laptop is relatively thin and its 4.85-pound weight seems reasonable given its size and wealth of high high end components.

Under the hood, the ZenBook NX500 packs a Core i7 CPU, Nvidia GTX 850M graphics, up to 16GB of RAM and single or dual SSDs with capacities up to 512GB. The laptop carries a full array of ports, including three USB connections, an SD card reader, HDMI and DisplayPort out. 

However, you won’t buy the NX500 for its looks or its performance. You”ll buy it because of its breathtaking 4K screen, which is capable of displaying 100 percent of the NTSC color gamut, which is also 146 percent of the sRGB gamut. We recently began performing color tests on all the devices that enter our lab and many notebooks can barely crack 70 percent of sRGB, so this is twice as good.

Color gamut and resolution numbers aside, the ZenBook NX500 has the most vibrant display we’ve ever seen on a notebook. Colors like the green in a towel or the reds and yellows in a pile of fruit looked as real as if they were sitting on a table in front of us. 

ASUS put two NX500s next to each other with the one on the left showing 100 percent of the NTSC gamut and the one on the right having been modified to use a smaller color space. The picture of fruit  on the right hand display appeared so muted that the strawberry looked a little purple, but the srawberry on the left was a deep red.

The ASUS ZenBook NX500 is due out later this year. We look forward to putting its screen up against our color tests to see if it looks as good in the lab as it did on the show floor.

ASUS 4K Monitor Displays Stunning Glasses-Free 3D

Those 3D glasses may soon be a thing of the past, at least when watching three dimensional content or games at home. At Computex 2014, ASUS showed off a prototype 28-inch monitor that displays truly stunning, glasses-free 3D while rendering 2D content at a full 4K resolution.
From smartphones like the LG Optimus that offered mediocre image quality to laptops like the Toshiba Qosmio F755, which had to track a single viewer's eyes with the webcam, most attempts at glasses-free 3D have been huge disappointments
However, we had a chance to watch a loop of movie and game clips on the unnamed monitor and were blown away by the quality of the 3D images. An ASUS rep told us that the monitor supports 28 viewing angles and, indeed, we were still able to see the 3D effects clearly as we walked around the monitor's circumference.
 "Star Trek," each of the characters appeared to be at different depth levels within the screen. We also felt like we could reach out and scratch Scotty's chin, because the image seemed to pop out a bit in addition to appearing as if it receded further into the screen. An ASUS representative told us that all the video clips in the loop were made with the Dolby 3D process for added quality.

Users don't have to just sit passively and watch movies in 3D. In a clip from a video game, a soldier appeared to be floating above the background as he walked as he walked around a battlefield.