Samsung R420

Full Review

The Samsung R420's a 14-inch all-black laptop that comes with a nice feature set and design.

The Samsung R420 looks pretty much identical to the Samsung R470 laptop from the outside. Also, the Samsung R420's all-black matte exterior is a welcome change from all the gloss-encased laptops thronging the market these days. The glossy 14-inch screen makes up for it, though--it supports a widescreen resolution of 1366x768 pixels. The abundance of matte finish on the laptop's body means no fingerprints, unlike the Acer Aspire 4736 (glossy screen, lid, bezel) and Compaq CQ40 (glossy screen, lid, bezel) which attract quite a few.

The abundance of matte finish on the Samsung R420's body means no fingerprints--what a welcome change!

We like how entry level laptops are relatively well-configured these days. Like the Acer and Compaq laptops, the Samsung R420 comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 2.2-GHz processor. There's 3GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and Intel GMA X4500 onboard graphics adapter. One glaring omission on the Samsung R420 is it doesn't come with Gigabit Ethernet and Draft-N Wi-Fi. But it's one of only two laptops that comes with a multicard reader and ExpressCard slot combo support. Another unique feature of the Samsung R420 is that it's the only laptop in the comparison that comes with an eSATA port to plug in an external drive.

Synthetic benchmarks, which includes a WorldBench 6 score of 91, peg the R420's performance second only to the Compaq CQ40. But its onboard sound is definitely better than the Compaq CQ40 in terms of loud and clear music playback. Both the laptops weigh same at 2.4-kg, with a six-cell battery, but the Samsung R420's battery ran out a few minutes before the Compaq CQ40's.

The Samsung lacks only the graphics card like on the Compaq Presario CQ40-536TX, otherwise it's a good laptop for your money if you like the all-black, non-glossy look.

Bottom Line

The Samsung R420's a nice 14-inch laptop with an all-black, non-glossy exterior. It offers good performance, but has some chinks in its feature set and has mediocre battery life.