Panasonic CF-62 review

The Panasonic CF-62 weighs a chart-topping 4.3kg and is a fat 60mm thick, of which 46mm is the main body itself. The travel-proof magnesium alloy lid protects the screen from crush damage. What's more, the machine offers a solid base specification of a Pentium/133, 256Kb of synchronous cache, 16Mb of EDO RAM (expandable to 80Mb) and a 1.2Gb hard disk.

But its main claim to fame is what lurks beneath its hinged keyboard - namely a dual-function drive that can handle both CD-ROMs and Panasonic's rewritable PD cartridges. A PD cartridge contains a platter the same 12cm diameter as a standard CD-ROM, but the material of its recording layer can be phase-shifted between crystalline and amorphous states by the application of heat in the form of a high-intensity laser beam.

According to Panasonic, the drive can be erased and rewritten more than 500,000 times, giving a removable optical storage system capable of holding 650Mb of editable data. This could be used for a handy backup system, CAD, graphic design, multimedia/

CD-ROM authoring and presentations, and it could act a resource for sales and support personnel in the field.

It's reasonably quick too: in CD-ROM mode the drive operates at quad-speed, which gives you an average seek time of about 230ms and a transfer speed of 600Kbytes/sec. In PD mode, on the other hand, its seek time is 180ms, and although transfer can fall to 518Kbytes/sec it peaks at 1,141Kbytes/sec.

Some effort has gone into making the CF-62 more capable with graphics than the typical portable. It has a Chips & Technologies 65550 accelerator fitted with 2Mb of dedicated EDO RAM to give 16-bit colour at 1,024 « 768, and both the Type II PC Card slots support the new Zoomed Video (ZV) standard. They provide a direct data path for video input from the card to the 65550's video decoder, cutting out the CPU and reducing the processing overhead of handling motion video inputs.

The screen is a bright 12.1in active-matrix panel that runs at a sharp 1,024 « 768 resolution; surely the next standard for top-end portables. You can run at SVGA in 16-bit colour, as the screen supports 65,536 colours in this mode.

The machine has an expansion bus and an optional docking station, but you can get a less elaborate port replicator. It also has an infrared serial port which conforms to the IrDA 1.1 standard and runs at 4Mbytes/sec rather than the original 115Kbytes/sec.

The build is fairly modular, with a removable hard disk and floppy drive (soon to be replaced by an MPEG1 video decoder). Both the floppy drive module and the battery were tough to remove, but that's better than being loose and liable to drop off.

Sound quality from the 0.2W stereo speakers set into the lower bezel was fair by notebook standards, and the trackpad set in the palmrest worked well.

The keyboard has a mainly sensible layout, and a clean though quiet action. The above-average thickness of the case is offset by the support provided by the palm-rest, and you can adjust the typing angle with the flick-down feet at the back.

There's a Windows-based utility for power management setup that allows changes to take effect without rebooting. The CF-62 doesn't run for ever, but if you don't hammer the CD/PD drive and audio you should get two to three hours use out of its lithium ion battery pack.

Even in terms of speed, the Panasonic is a winner. The only drawback is the price, although it's not outrageous for a top-end notebook. If you need the PD drive, rugged build quality, excellent screen and multimedia expansion, the Panasonic would make a worthy investment.

Author: Dominc Bucknall