Case In Action

The power button is capable of two colors. When the enclosure is not on, a red light symbolizes standby, while blue is shown when the computer is up and running. This should go really well in a home theater rack, as red is used to denote standby in most such devices.

The small video below shows you how the motorized display goes down and back up with the push of a button:
AVI Video ~900 KB.


The above picture is only meant to give you a good idea about the brightness of the display, while the following pictures are taken in low light surroundings. It is certainly bright enough, but any modern stand alone LCD will have better specifications than the built-in one.


To gain access to the optical drive, the entire display needs to be dropped down. As you can see, the DVD drive color shines through. The NEC drive did not open, as the tray got stuck behind the aluminum front. I had to open the enclosure and remove the tray cover before turning on the device again and ejecting the drive. This is the only way to line up the included aluminum cover of the S21T, when using an NEC drive and goes against the instructions found in the manual.


Once the display is lowered, a few additional features can be used. The left side of the display can store the included stylus, while the right holds the controls for the OSD (on screen display).


Setting up the display did yield a surprise. It works at 1920 x 1080 but the desktop ends up being bigger than the 12.1 inch screen. This leads to a scrolling screen on the TFT. The native resolution is a much more down to earth 1280 x 800. This is something you find on every notebook these days. I was under the impression that the display is actually capable of displaying the full HD resolution on the actual screen real estate. Now when using clone mode video cards allow you to setup scaling and scrolling which will result in the scrolling of the 1920 x 1080 size on the 1280 x 800 native resolution by default, however you can change the video driver settings to use the TFT panels build-in scaling to fit the 1920 x 1080 image onto the 1280 x 800 screen.


Surfing the web works perfectly fine as well. The stylus is very accurate and navigating web sites is incredibly comfortable with the metal stylus. I tried out both TechPowerUp.com and Origenae.com. I was so amazed and taken by the unsual input method, that I missed six phone calls on my cell phone - no kidding!


I openend the new Beowolf trailer in 720p from Apple.com with the screen set at 1280 x 800. The LCD is responsive enough, so that there is no visible ghosting even when playing scenes with strong contrast or high brightness. The color saturation and the deepness of black is very good, so it should be fun watching a movie on the 12.1 inch screen from time to time.