Samsung Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US)

Samsung Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US). A 14-inch screen and built-in DVD burner make the Samsung Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US) stand out from the ultrabook crowd. Optical drive and 14-inch screen top generic ultrabooks. Hybrid hard drive system almost as fast as SSDs, with more space. WiDi. No big advantage in weight or battery life over ultraportables and 14-inch slimlines.

With its DVD±RW drive and full array of ports, the NP530U4B-A01US splits the difference between ultrabooks like the Dell XPS 13 and ultraportables like the Editors' Choice Toshiba Portege R835-P50X. It also requires a model-number microscope to distinguish from the NP530U3B-A01US, which is a 13.3-inch ultrabook with no optical drive.

Design
At 0.8 by 13.1 by 9.0 inches (HWD), the Series 5 Ultra is fractionally bigger than 13.3-inch ultrabooks and fractionally smaller than 14-inch laptops like the Lenovo IdeaPad U400. It sports a handsome silver-gray aluminum lid and palm rest with a flat black chiclet-style keyboard.

The keyboard is not backlit, but has a comfortable if somewhat shallow typing feel with an exemplary layout including dedicated, full-sized Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys. The large touchpad also has dedicated left and right mouse buttons instead of just clickable corners, making it a pleasure to use.

The Series 5 Ultra's 14-inch display has the same 1,366 by 768 resolution you'll find throughout the ultrabook segment. It's nicely bright (300 nits), with a non-reflective matte finish and average viewing angles, and showed minimal flex without feeling flimsy in our grasp-by-the-corners test. Two dinky speakers above the keyboard provide sufficiently loud and clear audio, if not booming bass.

Features
Oddly, our test unit's 802.11n Wi-Fi wouldn't work out of the box, reporting no wireless networks within range even when we pressed Fn-F12 for Samsung's convenient wireless control panel to make sure it was switched on. We used the system restore function to return the Series 5 Ultra to factory defaults, after which Wi-Fi worked fine. Other wireless functions include Bluetooth and Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) for streaming screen and sound to an HDTV set equipped with a $100-or-so Belkin or Netgear adapter.

Next to the tray-loading DVD±RW drive on the Samsung's right side are a USB 2.0 port and SD/MMC memory-card slot. At the left are Ethernet, VGA, and HDMI ports; a headphone/microphone jack; and two USB 3.0 ports.

The Series 5 Ultra's storage system combines a 500GB hard drive (420GB free) with a 16GB solid-state drive dubbed Express Cache. The latter doesn't appear as a drive letter or partition, but is used to speed up booting and resume from sleep, which we stopwatched at roughly 34 and 3 seconds respectively.

Samsung supports the Series 5 Ultra with a one-year warranty. In addition to Windows 7 Home Premium, its software preload includes a 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security, the kudzu-like WildTangent games, and a handful of Samsung-brand utilities ranging from Easy Settings (a friendly alternative to digging through Windows Control Panel) to a Mac OS Dock-like (or Windows Taskbar-like) program launcher.

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