Fitting nicely between HP's enormous 20-inch HDX-9000 and relatively conservative 16-inch HDX 18t notebooks is its 18-inch entertainment-focused notebook. With a native 1920x1080 display, the HDX 18t offers significantly better resolution for its size than the 1366x768 resolution HDX 16t (at 3-inches smaller, Apple's 13-inch Macbooks display a native 1280x800), and improves upon the cheaper model by offering almost 200GB more storage at 500GB and a Blu-ray player. With its media-centric orientation, it ships with a myriad of connectivity options including HDMI, eSATA, gigabit ethernet, and firewire ports, not to mention a 5-in-1 media card reader.

Despite being touted as a media machine, this powerful 18-inch model may function well as a professional unit with its Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processor, 4GB of memory, and GeForce 9600M GT graphics card, costing half as much and matching or exceeding Apple's 17-inch Macbook Pro that sports the same speed processor, less memory, and the slower GeForce 8600M GT.