Display and Audio
Asus has an excellent track record with the displays used on their laptops and the W2J is no different. The panel is really sharp and bright with vibrant colours out of the box. I did not find I needed to adjust any of the visual settings to get a great image. The native resolution for the W2J is 1440×900 which is slightly below the industry top-end of 1920×1200 on a 17′ widescreen laptop display like on the Dell XPS M1710.
Just for reference, I compared the display on the W2J to the Dell M1710 display and found the Asus much better in brightness and colour rendition before doing any visual adjustments.
Asus W2J
* Continue reding below concerning the brightness.
Dell XPS M1710 @ 1440×900
* The images above show the same image at the same resolution on the Asus W2J and the Dell XPS M1710. The photos are a bit misleading because the Asus photo looks overexposed especially around the headlight, but this is because the Asus is much brighter than the Dell XPS M1710 thus causes my camera to overexpose this area relative to the rest of the image.
Audio
The speakers on the W2J are located just below the LCD, along the front, and a single ‘subwoofer’ on the bottom. The subwoofer is a bit of a gimmick since it really didn’t do too much at making a noticeable bass effect.
Audio is fairly good on the W2J, but still a bit disappointing compared to the Asus A7J which I still hold as the gold standard in terms of laptop speakers. Compared to the Dell XPS M1710, the M1710 comes out ahead with slightly better tonal balance across the whole frequency range, the W2J comes off as sounding a bit more metallic. This is a bit ironic since the W2J boasts a subwoofer that is supposed to improve audio quality.
