Toshiba Satellite L50D-C-13G review

Our Toshiba Satellite L50D-C-13G review sample came in a rather hard-to-ignore shade of purple, but there’s a raft of other colours if you don’t want something quite so outlandish.

That said, the bold purple does help distract from the L50’s truly woeful display. It’s a 15.6in glossy TFT panel with a 1,366×768 resolution, which is in line with the budget price, but panel quality is dire. Black levels were incredibly high at 0.66cd/m2, meaning blacks appear closer to grey. Brightness was poor at 258cd/m2, meaning it was a struggle to use the L50 outdoors. A contrast ratio of just 393:1 is also terrible and a testament to the poor black levels. Everything appears disappointing and washed out. Usually, a glossy display can help with the illusion of contrast, but that’s certainly not the case here.

^ Everything with the Satellite L50D-C-13G is incredibly glossy and reflective, from the chassis to the screen

Instead, all it did was cause unwanted reflections making the viewing experience even more frustrating. Colour accuracy was another area of concern, covering just 61.9% of the sRGB colour gamut, meaning this is certainly not a laptop for colour-sensitive work. Reds appeared closer to orange and incredibly washed out. Viewing angles are yet another area of disappointment, both on horizontal and vertical planes.

The chassis is standard fare for a budget laptop; decidedly plastic, quite heavy at 2.2kg, and hardly svelte at 23.5mm thick. The keyboard area is normally an area of concern for flex and bend, but there wasn’t any give when typing. The edge of the frame below the keyboard is rather sharp and rough feeling, however.

The keyboard itself is capacious, with a full-size number pad on the right. Keystrokes have very little travel, which can be a bit jarring. Some of the punctuation keys are reduced-size, and the cursor keys have been crammed in with them. Once you get used to the limited travel, it’s actually not a bad keyboard to type on, so we managed to build up to a reasonable speed.

The off-centre touchpad below the keyboard is a slightly different shade to the chassis. Your fingers glide across the slightly rough texture and it was decently responsive, even when using multi-touch gestures. Ideally it could have been a little larger, considering the size of the chassis, but it’s still perfectly useable.

Performance and Benchmarks

The L50 is powered by AMD’s Carrizo-based A10-8700P APU. This combines a quad-core processor running at 1.8GHz with Radeon R6 graphics. There’s a respectable 8GB of memory and a 1TB hard disk. The laptop still comes with Windows 8.1 installed, but as usual there’s a free upgrade to Windows 10 available.

Performance in our benchmarks was rather lacklustre, managing just 21 overall in our desktop performance benchmark, with its multitasking score of 7, in particular, pulling the average down considerably. Its scores of 41 and 30 in image and video editing were at least reasonable for the cost of the laptop.

The integrated graphics were actually very respectable, and on par with a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 920M GPU. We managed a reasonable 27.7fps in Dirt Showdown at 1,280×720 resolution, which, considering the display’s low resolution, didn’t look that bad. Modern titles remain out of reach, but if you keep your expectations in check you play more basic titles at lower graphics settings. Certainly Minecraft ran without any hitches.

The main standout achievement was the L50’s battery life. It managed a very impressive 5 hours 41 minutes in our light-use battery test. Just shy of what you can consider ‘all day battery’, but very good nevertheless.

Ports and connections

There are two USB3 ports and a single slower USB available. The HDMI port can output at up to 3,840×2,160 resolutions. Network connectivity comes from an Ethernet or 802.11n Wi-Fi. There’s also Bluetooth 4.0. On top of this, there’s an optical drive and an SD card reader included. The speakers are tuned by Skullcandy and actually don’t sound too bad, if unsurprisingly a little thin.

Conclusion

The Satellite L50D-C-13G is very much a budget laptop, where you largely get what you pay for. Even at this price the display was surprisingly bad, however. Performance wasn’t much better, making it a difficult to recommend. Ideally, if you can afford to stretch to a higher budget you’re much better off with the Acer Aspire V3-574G.