Asus Eee 1201N ION Review – The Netbook. Supercharged.

Audio and Video

Audio

The audio on the Eee 1201N is what I would classify as typical for a netbook. The treble is overly harsh and the bass is flat and muddy. To its detriment, the Eee 1201N comes with SRS pre-enabled and its default settings makes the audio sound worse by artificially sharpening the high frequencies.

SRS can help make the audio sound a little better, but it’s still pretty poor.

To mitigate this, you can use the SRS adjustment and turn the SRS Space down to 34% from 80%, Focus level to 21% from 40%, and SRS definition to 0% from 10%. Then in your media playback software, you would want to turn up the low frequency a little using the equalizer. This will make your music and movies sound a bit better.

I would still recommend using headphones or something portable like the Altec Lansing Orbit if you find the need for decent audio in your typical day.

Video

The 1366×768 12.1″ LED backlit display on the Eee 1201N is nice and bright, and text easy to read. But I found colour reproduction a bit flat when compared to a calibrated monitor, in particular red values lacked depth.

Asus provides image enhancing software called Splendid, but I found that these settings doing more harm than good by obscuring details or blowing out / over exposing white areas.

Luckily, since the Eee 1201N uses NVIDIA’s ION, you have access to NVIDIA’s control panel by installing the drivers from NVIDIA’s website. In the NVIDIA control panel, putting the Digital Color Vibrance to 65% (up from 50%) will produce more accurate colour values.

So my recommendation is to ditch the Splendid utility in favour of using NVIDIA’s control panel to adjust the digital vibrance. As long as you spend a little time to adjust your colours, the Eee 1201N’s display should be fine for your movies and daily work.