Huawei MateBook D 16

The £750 version is a true bargain, with a quite ridiculous amount of quality on offer for the money

- TIM DANTON

 SCORE

PRICE Core i7, £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk

Our previous reviews of Huawei's value-packed MateBook D range could be summed up as "great if you don't mind mid-range components and a second tier screen". The D 16 veers away from this script by including both a cutting-edge processor and a high-quality display, yet the price is still aggressively low.

Huawei is selling two variants of the D 16 in the UK: one for £750, one for £1,000. Both include a 512GB SSD, and the cheaper version has 8GB of RAM rather than 16GB, but the crucial difference is the CPU. Pay £750 and a Core i5-12450H is inside. This has eight cores four P-cores, four E-cores - to the 14 of the i7-12700H in its sibling.

Screen delight

Everything else is the same, including the 16in IPS panel. This has a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution for a 142ppi pixel density, so it lacks the sharpness of the best displays but is still easy on the eye from normal viewing distances. A 16:10 aspect ratio lends itself to viewing two windows side by side.

What most impressed me about the screen was its colour coverage. I've become used to budget laptops that include bargain basement displays, but this panel passed our technical tests with aplomb. I measured its sRGB coverage at 97% and DCI-P3 coverage at 70%, with an essentially perfect average Delta E (a measure of colour accuracy) of 0.52. Even the contrast ratio impresses at 1,393:1.

There's no touch support and its brightness peaked at 338cd/m², but these are far better scores than I've seen from previous Huawei MateBook D laptops. I wouldn't call it a premium panel for that, I would want wider gamut support - but it isn't far off.