Lenovo IdeaPad Y560d

Lenovo continues to create very nice looking laptops with its IdeaPad line. Lenovo IdeaPad Y560d is about as far from the office ready Lenovo mindset as we've seen, with a funky tribal tattoo design on the back of the lid. Other than that, the color scheme is similar to systems such as the IdeaPad Y460, with a copper accent strip around the outer edge of the lid and an interior mix of not too glossy black plastic and matte black keys. A row of backlit touch sensitive control buttons sit on top of the keyboard.

Running a finger back and forth along them pops up a quick launch bar, with assignable slots for different apps. It's clever looking, but it takes some getting used to. Running your finger along the right part of it can also change the desktop background image, but we never got the hang of pulling that off consistently. The keyboard and touch pad are excellent, even though Lenovo IdeaPad Lenovo IdeaPad Y560d uses a tapered key keyboard (more like the traditional ThinkPad design), rather than the flat topped island style one seen on most other IdeaPad models.

The 15.6 inch wide screen display offers a 1,366x768 pixel native resolution, which is standard for a 16:9 midsize laptop screen. It's great for 720p HD video content, but it can't display 1080p content at full resolution. Hardcore gamers may want higher resolutions, and we were also troubled by the faint horizontal lenticular lines that are sometimes visible, even when not using any 3D applications that's a byproduct of the polarized 3D system. Under the hood, Lenovo IdeaPad Y560d is a very impressive machine.

With a 1.6GHz Intel Core i7 720QM CPU, a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive, and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 graphics, it's powerful enough for just about any task. The system holds its own against other high end laptops such as the HP Envy 17 and Toshiba A665-3DV (both also Core i7 systems) in our benchmark tests. But what we're really interested in is the 3D capabilities. We've had experience with the TriDef system before, and found this version to be largely the same.

Lenovo IdeaPad Y560d includes a basic pair of cheap plastic polarized glasses, plus a second pair of clip-ons for those of us who already wear glasses (be warned: it's not a cool look). The screen has to be tilted at just the right angle. For us it was about 120 degrees back, and with us sitting about twice as far from the screen as we normally would. The effect works best with objects that recede into the distance, where we could sometimes get an excellent 3D effect.

Objects that popped out of the screen toward us often got blurry or out of focus, as did some menus rendered in 3D. Keep in mind that it's very important to keep your head still to main just the perfect angle. To get games to play in 3D, they have to be run through the TriDef wrapper app, which is an easy enough process, but one with a lot of processing overhead. Playing Street Fighter IV (which looked very good in 3D), we got an average of 32 frames per second (at the native 1,366x768 pixel resolution) when running the game normally, but that dropped to about 13 frames per second when running it in 3D.

That's especially disappointing given the high powered hardware. On the positive side, the plastic polarized glasses are passive, and don't require batteries or recharging. Also, no external IR emitter dongle is required (as in Nvidia 3D Vision systems), making this a more compact, no extras required setup.