By Oo Gin Lee

SIXTEEN inches is the new sweet spot for consumers looking for a larger-sized multimedia laptop that will not yank out their limbs when they lug their machines around.

You can get the same high-definition crisp images (1,920 x 1,080) on today's multimedia laptops as on the full HD TV in the living room.

Most of them come with Blu-ray drive and powerful speakers, often with a built-in mini-subwoofer as well, to pump up the volume while you enjoy your high-definition movies.

The Blu-ray drive also typically doubles up as a DVD writer so you can store your home videos and photos and burn them onto discs to share with friends and family.

In some machines, there are decent graphics cards which turn these sleek laptops into gaming centres.

All of them have dedicated multimedia buttons, which are soft touch-sensitive keys and, sometimes, back-lit as well to add a touch of style.

The evolution of laptops to the 16-inch models is a chain reaction to netbooks encroaching into the laptop space.

It used to be that netbooks, when they were first out at the end of 2007, were just 7-inch models. However, consumers did not like the too-small screens, yet wanted their machines to be lightweight.

So, laptop makers brought out 8.9-inch, then 10-inch and 12-inch models in the space of a year.

To differentiate the pricier mainstream laptops from the sub-$500 to $1,000 netbooks, manufacturers started to bump up the screen sizes - from 12-inch to 13.3-inch models for the ultra-portables, and from 17-inch to 18.4-inch versions for the desktop replacements.

For the multimedia laptops, the upsizing went from 14 and 15 inches to 16 inches from the end of the last year.

Digital Life takes a look at six such models.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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