Sony VAIO VPC-J117FX/B 21.5-inch All-In-One Touchscreen Desktop PC

Oct 20 2010 - Sony's VAIO J all-in-one desktop is going to be directly compare to Apple's 21-inch iMac because of its similar screen size and price tag. It does have the advantage of coming with a Blu-ray drive and a touchscreen display. The downside is that the lacks the same level of performance or sophistication of Apple's design. The decision between the two will really come down to if you want the touchscreen and Blu-ray or not.

Oct 20 2010 - Sony's VAIO J series all-in-one is very much designed to compete directly with Apple's iMac units. It features a similar size display and case as its competition but has some very distinct differences including an black plastic exterior and a slightly higher price tag.

Powering the Sony VAIO VPCJ117FX/B is the Intel Core i5-450M dual core mobile processor. This gives it some good performance compared to many other all-in-one systems but it falls short of the Apple iMac with its desktop class Core i3 processor. Sony does pack the system with 6GB of DDR3 memory to allow it to multitask or run memory intensive applications without any slowdowns.

The key storage feature on the VAIO J series is the Blu-ray compatible drive. This gives it a strong feature that is sorely lacking from the Apple product lineup. It allows it to playback high definition Blu-ray movies in addition to being able to playback and record CDs or DVDs. A 500GB hard drive is included for storing applications, data and media files. It uses a standard desktop class drive with 7200rpm speed. Also included on the system is a slot for both SD and Memory Stick media cards.

One of the big features of the VPCJ117FX/B is the 21.5-inch touchscreen display. It features a high 1920x1080 resolution for full support of the 1080p HD video support. As with many display, it uses a glossy coating which causes a fair amount of glare and reflections. Since it is a touchscreen, it also shows lots of fingerprints. Expect to be cleaning it frequently if you use the touchscreen features often. The stand of the screen is essentially a fold out arm on the back of the display. This gives a very limited angle to the displays tilt making it more difficult to place for proper viewing.

Driving the graphics is the NVIDIA GeForce 310M dedicated graphics with 512MB of memory. This is a very low end graphics processor that does a good job with HD video but lacks much performance for 3D graphics. It may be able to play some casual 3D games at lower resolutions and details. One big omission on the VAIO J is any sort of display output such as HDMI so that it can be connected into a secondary or larger display.

Included with the system are a wireless keyboard and mouse that use the 2.4GHz spectrum. This is great for keeping cable clutter to a minimum when using the VAIO J. The keyboard uses an isolated key design similar to laptop keyboards and does include a full sized numeric keypad. While this is a nice touch, the power supply to the system is an external power brick rather than an internal model. This is disappointing since the iMac with a similar depth has an internal power supply.