Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for cnet today we're going to take a look at hp's Omni 27 so this is the largest windows-based all-in-one and we say that because it has a 27 inch screen pretty much every other large windows on one before this has a 23 or 24 inch display so HP is currently the king of the block in terms of screen size now apples iMac of course also has a 27 inch model that actually has a higher resolution in this HP but for most consumers the 1080p resolution on this 27 inch HP should be good for home entertainment particular if you want to watch blu-ray movies so our 1249 configuration here comes with a core i5 cpu eight gigs of ram a one terabyte hard drive embedded graphics and a slot-loading blu-ray drive that's a fairly average configuration for a system of this price it's really the screen that sells the system so it's worth noting this is not a touchscreen like a lot of only ones we see these days that said HP is still included it's magic canvas software which is a touch oriented platform designed to give you sort of a larger working space that makes it easier to use if you're using just your finger we're not really sure why magic canvas makes sense here it really just seems to clutter up the display that said you can turn it off completely ignore it so it doesn't really do any harm HP also includes beats audio on the Omni which as far as we can tell it's just a software overlay that exposes some of the audio features already built into Windows 7 now that said we had no problems with the blu-ray audio when we played it got loud enough at kept its integrity so we really don't see the need for beats here but you might want to play with it I guess now the other very cool feature is that it comes with an HDMI input which is actually not unique but with this large screen that makes it very useful if you want to use the system as a home entertainment hub with HDMI in you can effectively use the system as a second display and connect a cable box a game console or any other HDMI based video source we do wish hpn included some other video ends and outs in the system it makes it easier to say use the second monitor or to use a perhaps legacy video devices for other connectivity features you get USB 3 USB 2 and a couple other audio jacks that's really about it we should also add that for about the same price you can get a 23 inch on one from another vendor that has much faster core specs so while the system can handle day-to-day browsing around and most mainstream tasks it's Betty graphics chip makes it hard to game on this system which is kind of disappointing even it's a nice big display so because this is the first 27 inch windows all-in-one HP can get away the charging a little bit more for it if you want to windows all in one with a nice big screen like this right now HP's is the only game in town that said we know later this year lenovo Samsung and other vendors will also have 27 inch Shaolin ones and those will actually have touchscreens so it might be worth waiting if you're in the market for a new large screen online so our merch brown this is the HP Omni 27