Display and Speakers

The Y410's display is a 14" TFT screen with a native resolution of 1280 x 800 resolutions. Although not the best screen we've seen in a notebook, the Y410's screen was still relatively good with colours, contrast and shades being quite sharp for a notebook of this range. Viewing angles another matter though, horizontal viewing wasn't much of a problem but don't expect people by your side to have a good view of your screen as the vertical viewing angles were pretty bad. I could only get a good view if I was facing the screen head on.

Above the TFT screen you'll find a 1.3 megapixel webcam which also doubles up as a security feature for the notebook. Most business notebooks these days come with some sort of biometric security function like fingerprint scanning (in fact the Thinkpad line has a few). However fingerprint security is becoming passé and Lenovo has decided to use the next step in security by using face recognition technology. Using Lenovo's VeriFace system, the webcam will recognise the users face and automatically log into the PC. You'd think that by just using a picture of a person, you'd be able to log in as well but I tested the system using a photo of myself, yet the VeriFace program did not recognise it, showing that at least the program is smart enough to distinguish between a real face and a picture. Image quality taken from the camera is passable as you can see from the image below.

As for sound, the Y410 is billed as coming with a Dolby Home Theater premium audio system as well as a subwoofer (which I found, was situated on the underbelly of the notebook). To be honest, I'd still rather hook up a pair of speakers to the notebook. Not to say that the Y410's speakers were bad, in fact they were much better than most of the notebook speakers we've seen and heard so far. However, when compared to a normal pair of speakers, the normal speakers would still win in terms of sound quality.

Performance:

As far as performance goes, the Y410 did relatively ok in our PC Mark 05 test. Due to it being only equipped with 1GB of memory and the graphics did affect its scores. And as you can see from its 3D Mark 06 scores, you shouldn't expect to play any graphic intensive games on it. However you could still play World on Warcraft on the Y410, though you might want to lower the graphics settings a little. 

PC Mark 05 Results  

3D Mark 06 Results 

Battery performance was pretty good though not excellent. I managed a good four hours with the screen set on medium brightness for surfing while watching a movie on the Y410 netted me around 3 hours 20 minutes which is pretty good for a notebook of its caliber. The Y410 was also pretty silent and  quite cool to the touch to after long hours of usage. This is due to the large fan the notebook uses which helped in the cooling and produced less noise due to is slower rotations.