Lenovo ThinkPad W510 Review Discussion

The ThinkPad W510 is Lenovo’s 15.6-inch workstation notebook offering an Intel Core i7 processor and NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics. New to this year’s model is an optional 1080P multi-touch screen with a 95% color gamut and built-in huey PRO color calibration system. In this review, we take an in-depth look at the ThinkPad W510 to gauge its performance as a mobile workstation.

Read the full content of this Article: Lenovo ThinkPad W510 Review

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Now that's thicker than some of the girls in my area!!

 

No IGP enabled?

 

Heard many compliments about W510 build quality. . A little pity when it was not rewarded an Editor's choice

 

Why review a configuration thats not even available for sale anymore. The W510 does not have the 1080p FHD screen available as an option anymore.

 

The screen being unavailable is only a short term stock issue.

 

Actually looks pretty nice. But for me a numpad would make this a perfect laptop for me. I also kinda wish there was an option to choose which mouse input you want as I would love to get rid of the touchpad all together.

 

For me, not having a numpad was one of the primary deciding factors between a Thinkpad and an HP Elitebook. I hate sitting off center to the screen.

As far as input, you can't order with one left out, but you can turn one or the other off completely.

 

I know you cannot order one without a touchpad thats why I said "I wish..". But the off center thing doesn't bother me as I rarely watch where my hands are when typing. Plus I use the numpad all the time. As for the HP elitebook while they are nice, getting a quad core version costs $3000+. No thanks, for that price I'd rather have a precision m6500 or alienware m17x.

 

So this one has the pure plastic lid, right Kevin?
Can you take some pictures of the inside?

 

that battery life is nothing short of amazing!

 

Very powerful beast, although it looks quite thick. At least it manages heat very well! The screen looks very nice, although some of the colors do look a tad bit oversaturated.

Thanks for the review, Kevin, I was waiting for this

 

Wow I almost forgot about the removal of the roll cage. DOH

 

High resolution images of a ThinkPad apart? NOT ON MY WATCH

Please be gentle with the links... all are nearly full resolution minus a bit of crop from the camera.

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You are claiming nearly 2 more hours of battery life then most other reviews for surfing the web! Do you get similar times when say, watching a movie? Everything I've seen for the W510 with 9 cell is more in the 2.5 hour range.

 

What's that thing on the left of the fingerprint reader? And most important, it has to be precisely there, just on the palm rest?

 

Guess it's part of the color calibration system.

 

so looking at big stickers inside I take it that W510 is manufactured by Wistron?

 

Speaker quality?

 

The "Screen and Speakers" section does not mention anything about speaker quality. Not that I expect much from the ThinkPad speakers, but it is a rather unusual design decision for a business laptop to sacrifice the number pad for big speakers, which makes me wonder about its speaker quality.

 

The speakers are really not that big, the grilles are just for appearance. I think the reason Lenovo didn't try to cram in a numpad is that first of all, that would require another tweaked version of the keyboard rather than keeping the same design across the board, and second of all, the ergonomics are better when the keyboard is centered (personally, I find it strange typing on some of the 15.6" and 16" laptops that have a numpad).

But back to the point: yes, it does seem like a sentence or two about the speakers was left out.

 

Our speaker area got chopped off in a draft when we worked in the multitouch section. Added it into the review.

Given the size and placement of the speakers that you can see in the high-res shots... going with a full-size keyboard with numberpad would have been the better choice. There was really no need to take up that much space. I can understand why Lenovo did this though, since they can use the same keyboard across multiple models. I think the W700 keyboard would have been way too wide to fit on this.

 

Hmm, so basically the move to 16:9 has no benefits, only drawbacks. I was hoping for better speakers or a numpad, and it looks like I got neither

 

So there it is, all plastic!
Though internal seems to be an improvement over my T61. Especially the space above the DVD-drive.

Thanks a lot for the picture Kevin.

 

HP did this for their 15.6 models and it works fine. I actually notice very little to no difference when typing on a 12in HP vs my brothers 15.6 with numpad. What they do is cram the numpad not the keyboard so its more usable then a mobile numpad yet doesn't sacrifice the keyboard layout, feel and typing experience. I feel as though they could have used the same keyboard layout that is present and still put some sort of numpad in there. Think about the sager numpads, while I prefer the more traditional style they can fit in slimmer spots.

Nope just a 10% loss in usable screen space is all you get.

 

I was a little bit unclear -- is the quoted battery time in the NBR review actively surfing the web, or just the computer with wireless on, but left idle to let the battery run out? I had the sense from the text that it was the latter. Clearly in other reviews they describe the battery test as involving active surfing of the web. Any clarification from NBR?

 

It’s very unfortunately, to say the least, that this laptop simply cannot do 1920x1200. To be fair though nobody out there does it in the 15'' division. I’d promptly buy one of these if its praised screen was WXUGA, not HD, not HD+ (as sales people surreptitiously started calling best LCD you can buy nowadays) just old fashion, standard 1920x1200. Lenovo just discontinued the W500 model which has WUXGA, but wait… nobody is offering that! So, what should they! And if you check the comparison in the Thinkpad W site you will see prominently WUXGA in selected W510 models but make sure you call them first as that belong to the past. It’s a brave new world.

 

Agreed! Very impressive....

I was also impressed with the heat management.

It's a pity about removing the rollcage though....

 

Cons are Pricey? so Mercedes is bad because its Pricey? if you cant afford a pricey Thinkpad buy an Acer Dell HP Etc...!!! ThinkPads are premium products i hope they always remain pricey!!!

 

16:10 still is better... any way not bad, but no roll cage = fail.

 

it uses GFRP, which is better than the ABS, not sure how much stronger or weaker it is, compared to the SEPC+Magnesium rollcage of the W500. There is a likely possibility that rollcage was dropped to accommodate the multitouch LCD capability without increasing the thickness of the lid.

 

Thinkpads aren't too bad on price. Also don't think that thinkpads are built any better then HP and Dell business because they are not. I own both and they are about on par.

Agreed.

 

Interesting comments on the color gamut making the display unpleasant to some.

Not sure I agree, since better gamut can mean better accuracy which would always be desirable especially for viewing and editing video and photos which seems to be the target market for this unit.

So you are saying a less accurate, washed out image is better? Do you prefer the picture quality of your TV over an imax to watch a movie like Avatar?

 

high gamut thing is more of an unfamiliarity issue i believe. Looks funky at first but once you get used to a high gamut monitor its very hard to go back to a "normal" one.

 

Wait, there is no roll cage????

 

Not for the screen. I believe the base has one still.

 

The reason high gamut isn't necessarily good is that the entire world uses sRGB. High gamut sRGB is one thing, high gamut Adobe RGB which I believe these monitors are is another. If your monitor is in one color space and you are producing pictures for another color space you can get yourself into trouble really quick. You have to be sure that every step of the way you have a good color profile loaded into every color managed application. That way when you do your final step and convert back down to the smaller color range of sRGB for printing/internet display/etc you get the correct output.

It's a terrible misconception people have that high gamut means more accurate or better. Color calibration gets you accuracy and is independent of the gamut range a monitor can produce. Ideally you should be using a monitor that displays 100 percent gamut of the color space you are producing for.

Nearly every commercial print system (ezprints, shutterfly, etc) are all sRGB, all picture on the web are sRGB. Only production print like newspapers and magazines take AdobeRGB as their input.

 

Good observations and you are correct on many counts. I was partially poking fun. I used to work for a service bureau back in the day and customers were constantly frustrated by "it didn't look anything like that on screen"

We would then have to explain what a color space was, how to read gamut warnings and so on.

That all being said, I think a high gamut screen to my eyes looks much better for the range and complexity available when editing photos on screen.

People like what people like though. We had one of the first gen LCD televisions and we upgraded a couple of years ago to one of the Pioneer Kuro plasma sets and my wife didn't like it at first. She thought everything looked "fake"

 

I wish that Lenovo would give us the option of FHD and HD+ with a high gamut screen and the ability to switch them between the 2 color spaces. Would solve so many problems! It's too bad that your choice is ~70% gamut or whatever the other screens are and 95% AdobeRGB. Why can't I have 100% sRGB for when I'm doing that work! Those are the features that I feel would warrant it being a photographers machine.

 

If you meant this then you are wrong. Again I own a dell business and a t series thinkpad, not to mention all the other dell business and thinkpads I have used/supported at work and all. Im telling you with 100% certainty and real world experience that there is no difference.

 

Are you sure you have a T series Thinkpad?

 

Yes, I would agree with liquid - comparing the T/W/X series to the Dell Latitude/Precision and HP Elitebooks.

 

liquidxit is right.

 

Pretty sure. If you need picture proof I'll snap one when I get home.

 

DELL Thinkpad or Lenovo Thinkpad?

 

From my experiences, the Thinkpads are on the same level as the HP Elitebooks and Dell Latitudes in terms of build and design, each having their pluses and minuses. It just so happened that Thinkpads fit my requirements the best

 

Anyone know if the FHD display on the W510 is a TN screen, or one of its variants? I don't believe based on the wash-out at off-angles that it's AFFS; I know it's definitely not IPS. Wondering if it's just traditional TN tho, or other. Actually, someone on a photography forum I'm very active on is wondering.

 

where is the microphone and headset jacks ?

 

Almost all notebooks in general use 6-bit TN panels but for sure all 15" are 6-bit TN. The current models with non-TN panels can be counted on with one hand, off the top of my head HP Elitebook 8740w will come out with IPS, X200 w/ AFFS+ and Fujitsu T5010 (I think) uses MVA. The Dell Precision M6500 uses a 8-bit TN panel.