Sony launches FZ series in Asia

Darius Chang | Jul 03, 2007

Descended from the FE series, the new VAIO FZ sports the same slim chassis as its predecessor. But is a refreshed chipset the only differentiating factor?

A cursory inspection will probably reveal that the Santa Rosa-based portable sports an HDMI connector for streaming high-definition video to an external display. However, one would have to look closely at the specification sheet to realize that the FZ series may be one of the first portables to incorporate an SDHC-compatible slot. The SD card format has a 2GB restriction, thus the newer SDHC standard was announced which allow capacities to exceed the previous limit. Unfortunately, SDHC is not backward-compatible. Hence, though you may use an SD card in the SDHC reader, you cannot read SDHC in older devices.

The FZ series comes in three flavors with different processor clock speeds justifying the respective prices. The VAIO VGN-FZ15G costs S$2,499 (US$1,809.69) and has a Core 2 Duo 1.8GHZ processor. The VGN-FZ17G goes for a 2GHz chip at an additional S$500 (US$362.08) premium, while the top-of-the-line 2.2GHz VGN-FZ18G model retails at S$4,699 (US$3,402.85). The latter is priced so much higher because it incorporates a Blu-ray optical drive under the hood. All models come with a 15.4-inch display with an Nvidia GeForce 8400M GT graphics processor driving them. The 15.4-inch FZ notebook may be rather light for its category. Unfortunately, the tradeoff is that it has only an ExpressCard/34 slot, while other similarly sized models use the larger ExpressCard/54 interface.