HP's ENVY 17 3D - HD3D's Difficult Road to a Seamless 3D Experience

The HP 17-inch ENVY laptop is delightful. It has one of the best 3D screens I have ever seen, and it comes with one set of 3D Liquid Crystal shutter glasses. It can show 3D movies and stereoscopic 3D games (S3D), as well as show 3D photos and Google Earth in 3D.


HP's Entrance into the world of 3D: a 17" notebook with XpanD 3D Glasses, 120Hz Full HD display and a sound system by Dr.Dre (Beats)

The system's screen resolution is 1920x1080 on a 17.3-inch panel with 120Hz refresh rate, TN LCD panel with sRGB+ gammut and 400 cd/m2 brightness. The display controller is an AMD Radeon HD 5850 with 1GB GDDR5 video memory. It has an Intel Core i7-740QM Processor running at 1.73GHz, with 4GB DDR3 RAM. And you get all that for just $1,550 (plus taxes).

The laptop is a sweet machine, with lots of power, lots of I/O, a dual hard drive up to 2TB (or optional Solid State Drive), HP ProtectSmart, which detects if your laptop is dropped and automatically locks the hard drive to prevent data loss, and an island-style backlit keyboard with numeric keypad and oversized clickpad. It comes with a 6-cell Lithium-Ion battery (up to 2.5 hours), or you can upgrade to a 9-cell (up to 3.75 hours).

It has two radios built in, an Intel Wireless-N Wi-Fi4 with Bluetooth. There's 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN, active HDMI 1.3c port, a mini-Display port, three USB 2.0 ports (one is shared with the high-speed eSATA combo port), and a 5-in-1 digital media card reader - everything you could possibly want in a laptop.


AMD Mobile Eyefinity in Action: HP Envy 17 3D running in sync with two additional displays

What's more, with the HDMI, DP, and VGA outputs you can use AMD's Eyefinity and drive two screens in addition to the  laptop's screen, or close the lid and drive three external screens - plus what you could drive with DisplayLink USB dongles. We set it up with two external screens using the DisplayPort and VGA. AMD's Mobile Radeon HD 5850 is based on 800-core Broadway-Pro core (desktop counterpart: Juniper Pro, i.e. Radeon HD 5700 Series).

AMD HD3D versus nVidia 3D Vision


On the left, 3D Vision by nVidia. On the right, XpanD active glasses for AMD HD3D

The HP shutter glasses (from XpanD) have a larger lens than the nVidia glasses. That's a good thing; it gives you more peripheral view and makes you (me) feel a little less claustrophobic. They also fit over corrective glasses better than nVidia's.

S3D is supported by DDD drivers working in conjunction with AMD drivers. With a setup like this, we ventured to discover just how seamless is AMD HD3D experience.