A slightly hefty but superb content creation station
I was picked to write the "20 Most Influential PCs" feature for PCMag's 40th Anniversary coverage because I remember them all—I started on a TRS-80 magazine in 1982 and served as editor of Computer Shopper when it was a 700-page monthly. I was later the editor in chief of Home Office Computing, a magazine that promoted using tech to work from home two decades before a pandemic made it standard practice. Even in semiretirement in Bradenton, Florida, I can't stop playing with toys and telling people what gear to buy.
HP's OLED-screened Envy 16 is poised to upset some famous, four-lettered, 15.6-inch power-user portables.
Officially, HP's Envy laptops are only its second-best consumer models, slotted between affordable Pavilions and flagship Spectres, but you'd never know it from looking at the new Envy 16 (starts at $1,389; $1,809 as tested). A desktop replacement that straddles the content creation and gaming segments, it's available with a blazing Intel Core i9 processor and a snazzy OLED display, as well as luxuries like a 5-megapixel webcam. It's neither cheap nor feather-light, and its midrange Nvidia graphics processor won't satisfy fanatic gamers, but it's an attractive all-around performer that costs hundreds less than a comparably equipped Dell XPS 15. Indeed, it's impressive enough to replace the XPS 15 as our Editors' Choice holder among premium creative laptops.
The base model of the Envy 16 is $1,389 at HP.com. It combines a Core i5-12500H CPU with Intel's 4GB Arc A370M graphics accelerator and a 16-inch IPS screen with 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate.
Our test unit is a $1,809 Micro Center configuration—on sale for $1,699 at press time—with a Core i7-12700H chip (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads), Nvidia's 6GB GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, and the 3,840-by-2,400-pixel OLED touch screen. Windows 11 Home is standard, as is a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), 16GB of DDR5 memory, and Wi-Fi 6E. (Entry-level units have Wi-Fi 6.)
Clad in partly recycled aluminum in a hue HP calls Natural Silver, the Envy measures 0.78 by 14.1 by 9.9 (HWD) inches, a millimeter thicker but otherwise identical to the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus, though the Dell is lighter—4.51 versus 5.12 pounds. There's just a bit of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck, though the plastic bottom panel creaks when I grab the laptop with one hand.
Display bezels are thin—HP cites an 88.7% screen-to-body ratio. Speakers flank the keyboard, and a key on the top row toggles a webcam shutter. The camera has infrared (IR) face recognition for Windows Hello; there is no fingerprint reader.
On the laptop's left side are a USB 3.1 Type-A port with drop-down cover, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack. On the right, you'll find another USB-A port with device charging capacity, two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI video output, and the AC adapter connector.
The Envy's audio features four speakers, with tweeters on either side of the keyboard accompanied by outputs at bottom front. I am slightly disappointed in the sound, which is a bit hollow and not particularly loud. However, there's a bit more bass than most laptops offer, and it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. Bang & Olufsen software provides music, movie, and voice presets and an equalizer, along with AI noise cancellation for conference calls.
The backlit keyboard commits HP's trademark error of arranging the cursor arrow keys in an awkward row, with half-size up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right, instead of the more comfortable inverted T. On the positive side, it has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of making you press the arrows with the Fn key, and a reasonably snappy if shallow typing feel.
Top-row controls include not only the aforementioned webcam shutter and a customizable program launch key but an emoji key. This key inserts any of a score of visual doodads ranging from the usual faces and foodstuffs to tiny animated GIFs (even a timely shot of the Sanderson Sisters from Hocus Pocus 2), ASCII drawings, and special punctuation. A good-sized, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly and takes light pressure for a quiet click.
The 3,840-by-2,400-pixel UHD touch screen isn't the brightest I've seen, but OLED technology gives it sky-high contrast with inky blacks and pristine white backgrounds (though it doesn't tilt back quite as far as I'd like). Fine details are razor-sharp, and colors are rich and vivid. An HP Display Control utility lets you choose among default, sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color palettes while an HP Command Center option dims inactive application windows to help lengthen screen life.
The high-resolution webcam can capture images in one of three resolutions: (1) QHD 2,560-by-1,440-pixel 16:9; (2) 2,592-by-1,728-pixel 3:2; or (3) 2,592-by-1,944-pixel 4:3. It can also snag 30-frame-per-second (fps) videos. Automatic brightness and low-light adjustment help keep its shots crisp and colorful with virtually no noise or static, and an HP Enhanced Lighting utility mimics a ring light to brighten your selfies. The camera can lock and unlock the system as you walk away and return.
For our benchmark charts, we matched the Envy 16 against four other premium desktop replacements—well, near-premium in the case of the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus and the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 7 convertible. The Dell XPS 15 (9520) and the Asus Vivobook Pro 16X join the HP in flaunting OLED displays. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and video conferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.
Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular tasks ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Envy 16 leads the way in our all-important PCMark 10 productivity test, though all five laptops crushed the 4,000-point score that indicates superb performance for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. The HP is half a step off the pace in HandBrake video encoding but otherwise aced the CPU tests (which the Vivobook's AMD Ryzen 9 underwhelmed in) and took the gold medal in Photoshop.
We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level ones, like game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more fps, the better.
Though the Envy isn't really a gaming rig or mobile workstation, we added two of the tests we use for those notebooks—the built-in 1080p benchmark of the AAA game Assassin's Creed Valhalla, run at medium and peak image-quality presets, and PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro, which automates a series of operations in the popular video editing app. The comparison systems in those charts represent a variety of mid-priced content creation and gaming laptops.
The Envy's GeForce RTX 3060 predictably edges out its RTX 3050 Ti challengers and humiliates the integrated graphics of the Yoga 7i. Its Valhalla results show it's certainly capable of playing a favorite game after hours, though rabid gamers will want to step up to an RTX 3070 or 3080 GPU. Plus, its splendid screen makes it a first-rate video editing workstation.
We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window) ) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
These laptops show impressive battery life considering their powerful components and ritzy screens; the HP lands in the middle of the pack with the XPS 15 bringing up the rear. The three OLED systems show the most fabulous color quality as expected. However, all five screens fall short of the 400 nits of brightness we usually hope for from a mid-range or high-end notebook, though that guideline applies more to IPS than to ultra-contrast OLED panels.
The Dell XPS 15 OLED has earned rave reviews, including ours—and while its screen may be 0.4 inch smaller than the Envy 16's, it's almost a pound lighter. But it's also $2,249 with a slightly slower GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU, a slightly lower-resolution screen, shorter battery life, and an inferior 720p webcam. The HP seen here is $400 less with the HDMI and USB-A ports that the Dell lacks, and its base model is a bargain with an appealing 2.5K, 120Hz display. (Lenovo's Yoga 7i 16 and Dell's Inspiron 16 Plus are worthy competitors, but have no OLED option.)
We wish the Envy 16 were under, instead of over, five pounds. But otherwise it's superb—and the latest winner of our Editors' Choice award.
HP's OLED-screened Envy 16 is poised to upset some famous, four-lettered, 15.6-inch power-user portables.
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I was picked to write the "20 Most Influential PCs" feature for PCMag's 40th Anniversary coverage because I remember them all—I started on a TRS-80 magazine in 1982 and served as editor of Computer Shopper when it was a 700-page monthly. I was later the editor in chief of Home Office Computing, a magazine that promoted using tech to work from home two decades before a pandemic made it standard practice. Even in semiretirement in Bradenton, Florida, I can't stop playing with toys and telling people what gear to buy.
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