When I think of a laptop that encompasses all things media, the first thing that naturally comes to mind is a media center—the granddaddy of all laptops. Grand in the sense that it carries many of the media capabilities found in a home theater, topped off with the processing power of a desktop. The Sony VAIO VGN-AR590E ($3,299 direct) is no stranger to the media-center motif. After all, it is the first laptop to feature a Blu-ray high-definition disc drive. Its latest venture involves putting in the latest processing parts from Intel to complement the Blu-ray burner. Interestingly enough, Sony also throws in an external ATI Digital Cable tuner that's supposed to bring a cable set-top box experience to your PC, but that feature proved very problematic in our testing.

It's been over a year since Sony launched its first Blu-ray equipped laptop, the Sony VAIO VGN-AR190G, which had a thin profile and a smooth piano-black finish. Sony found no reason to change that design with the AR590E, although the finish has a tendency to attract smudges and fingerprints. Its 8.2-pound frame makes it still one of the lightest 17-inch laptops on the market. (Only Apple beats that, with its 6.7-pound wonder, the MacBook Pro 17-inch (Core 2 Duo T7700).) If you ever owned or laid eyes on a Sony Bravia display, you'll understand when I say this company knows how to make screens. The 17-inch XBrite screen has a 1,920-by-1,200 resolution, which is often referred to as a 1080p-caliber screen. Whether you're playing the latest 3D games or watching the newest Blu-ray titles, it produces some of the richest colors and sharpest image detail in the market. That resolution is two notches higher than the 1,440-by-900 screen on the HP Pavilion dv9500t, and it matches that of the MacBook Pro 17-inch.

I'm not a big fan of the Sony keyboards, but the comfort level becomes tolerable as you spend more time with it. The keys don't offer the same resistance and responsiveness of a Dell Inspiron 1720 or an Apple MacBook Pro 17-inch keyboard. The positioning of the mouse buttons is somewhat unorthodox—on the edge of the front bezel, instead of right in front of the keys. The placement is perfectly acceptable, since the touchpad is well within reach, but I would enjoy the navigating experience a lot more if the mouse buttons weren't so noisy. I really like the idea of a locking mechanism that clamps the lid of the screen to the base. It's no different from any other laptop with a latch, but the AR590E is the only one that lets you tuck away the latch, via a physical release switch located on the front bezel.

Among Blu-ray laptops, the AR590E is the pick of the crop. The system comes with a BD-RE drive that'll let you watch the latest Blu-ray titles and burn high-definition content onto 25GB and 50GB BD-R media. (Unfortunately, an individual piece of this blank media can cost you an arm and a leg, about $15 for a 25GB blank and $30 for a 50GB disc.) Like the HD DVD-ROM on the HP dv9500t, the BD-RE drive will also burn both single- and dual-layer DVDs and CDs. The quality of Blu-ray playback has improved exponentially since the AR190G. Sony still uses Intervideo's WinDVD for BD, but the software is dramatically better. Mission Impossible on Blu-ray was stutter-free when I watched it, and skipping through chapters didn't cause any lag.

Sony usually sits among the elite with its long list of features. With the AR590E's price, I would certainly hope so. It comes with a standard set of USB ports (three) and a FireWire port. Unlike the Dell Inspiron 1720, the AR590E comes with an HDMI-port, so you can stream both HD video content and digital audio simultaneously to a larger display, say, your 60-inch plasma TV. It also has an optical-out port, which can be an alternate means of streaming digital audio through your home-theater system. There is an option for an integrated TV tuner, but it costs an outrageous $400 extra. The dual 160GB hard drives (320GB total) are probably plenty to hold all your media files. You can bump the storage up to 500GB total for an extra $470, if you need more space. As with most media centers these days, there's a 1.3-megapixel webcam on top of the screen, and there's also a media card reader that reads Secure Digital, Memory Stick, and Memory Stick Pro.

The AR590E includes a rather interesting accessory that will let you watch and record cable television on the laptop. It's called the TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner, and it's a clunky external USB box made by ATI. The idea here is that you can get a CableCARD, which is about the size of a PC Card, from your cable provider (in my case, Time Warner Cable) and watch TV on your PC. The CableCARD is inserted into the CableCARD tuner box and acts as an equivalent to a cable set-top box, where you can watch and record premium cable TV channels through Windows Vista's Media Center interface. Good luck in getting this device to work, though.

Attaching the necessary cables is easy enough. A USB cable goes from your CableCARD tuner to the AR590E. You'll need to attach the coax cable from your cable provider to the tuner. Lastly, the power adapter makes it three clunky cables. Windows Vista recognizes the tuner as a network device and assigns it an IP address, similar to a router. You will need a high-speed Internet connection for various software updates. There's a slot inside the tuner for the CableCARD, and once the card's inserted, you'll have to configure it through Windows Media Center. Another annoying aspect of the configuration process is that you'll have to call your cable provider to activate the CableCARD. The activation process took about 15 minutes, but the device decided to shut itself down permanently after it was activated. After an hour of tinkering with the hardware, I decided to give up and move on. I have seen a working version of this CableCARD tuner with the Dell XPS 410, and when it does work, it functions as a "home server" that can play back and record HD and premium cable content to your laptop hard drive. Until ATI and Sony (as well as the cable companies and Microsoft) can figure out the kinks, I would opt for a configuration without the CableCARD tuner.

The Sony AR590E uses top-notch processing components, notwithstanding the erratic tuner. Like the Acer Aspire 5920G, it loads a 2-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 CPU and 2GB of RAM, which are more than enough to handle your high-end media tasks. Despite using a slightly slower processor, it edged out both the HP Pavilion dv9500t and the Dell Inspiron 1720 on SYSmark 2007 Preview Overall. Your HD experience (as well as your 3D gaming ventures) will be further enhanced by the nVidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics card. It's the same card found on the Apple MacBook Pro 17-inch (Core 2 Duo T7700), except Apple's gives you more video memory (512MB).

The AR590E was one of the first systems to run BAPCo's latest battery-life benchmark test—MobileMark 2007. But its scores were among the worst of any laptop, at 1 hour 47 minutes. The HP and Acer units, with their bigger batteries, both got over 3 hours.

If you're looking for the best Blu-ray experience on a laptop, the Sony VAIO VGN-AR590E is your ticket to HD bliss. It includes the media features necessary to make this experience a worthwhile one. It even includes an ATI TV Wonder Digital CableCARD tuner, which sounds great on paper but is clearly not ready for prime time. Aside from that, the system ranks right up there with the best media centers, even if it is a little on the pricey side.

Benchmark Test Results
Check out the Sony VAIO VGN-AR590E's test scores.

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