Dell Studio 15 Artist Edition

Full Review

The stylish Dell Studio 15 Artist Edition combines excellent performance with very good design. It's screen lid is glossy white, adorned with Mike Ming's art. Whichever you choose on Dell's website, it sure looks awesome on the Studio 15 Artist Edition. It's definitely different from the cliched style adopted by most good-looking laptops in the market. Now, a lot of its design and build characteristics have trickled down to the entry-level Inspiron series of laptops, as we saw on the Dell Inspiron 15R and Dell Inspiron 14R.

No other laptop in our Mainstream Top 5 Laptops matches the Studio 15 Artist Edition's feature set, except the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 laptop.

The laptop is very well built. It's 15.6-inch glossy screen is quite bright while watching movies. It comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 2.2-GHz processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive. What's more, there's an ATI Radeon HD4570 graphics card bundled in to keep the casual gamers happy. It's also the most feature-rich laptop in the fray: apart from the three USB ports, audio jacks, and DVD writer, there's Gigabit Ethernet, Draft-N Wi-Fi, HDMI, eSATA, FireWire, multicard reader and ExpressCard slot! No other laptop in our Mainstream Top 5 Laptops matches the Studio 15 Artist Edition's feature set, except the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 laptop.

No qualms about its performance either—its WorldBench 6 score of 91 is better than the Ideapad Y450's score of 86. High-definition movies ran as smoothly as they could, and we also managed to game considerably well on the Studio 15. It's almost-rubberized keyboard is a welcome change from hard plastic ones, and it's a treat to type on. It's onboard sound was one of the best in the comparison, loud and clear.

Quite frankly, we can go on and on.

Bottom Line

Simply put: the overall verdict on the Studio 15 Artist Edition laptop—whether it's gaming or multimedia potential, using the keyboard or touchpad, feature set or overall performance—is one of the best we have seen. If budget isn't a restriction, then this is the best laptop under Rs. 50,000 right now.