With HD DVD making its debut this month in Toshiba's Qosmio G30, it's good to see Blu-ray appear at the same time. This month Sony introduces the VAIO VGN-AR18GP – the first notebook to include the next-generation format drive. While the industry is still split, it's the high-end consumers that are initially being targeted, with both the Qosmio and AR18GP being flagship products.

The VAIO's size is striking – despite having the same 17in widescreen LCD, the inch-thick bezel makes the AR18GP seem much larger than machines like the A-Listed Dell Inspiron 9400. It's also very definitely black, with the glossy, fingerprint-attracting finish feeling both luxurious and a little overwhelming.

The X-black screen is similarly glossy, running at an indulgent 1920 x 1200 pixels, and it's bright too. Horizontal viewing angles are good, but not topnotch vertically – the panel needed a little adjustment to keep the contrast even from top to bottom. As we'd expect, video playback and digital photos benefit from the apparent extra contrast from the glossy screen, although some slight motion lag is evident.

We found the front-mounted mouse buttons tricky at first, especially as the keyboard is pushed so far up. It's otherwise comfortable to work on, though, with good travel and a rock-solid foundation. There's no numeric keypad, with the space used for shortcut buttons.

It's disappointing that Sony Australia steadfastly refuse to include Windows MCE with products like this (instead plumping for XP Pro) as it would complement the notebook's multimedia capabilities perfectly. The speakers give a reasonable volume, but bass response is limited, and you'll need more to really get immersed in music and movies.

Most of the expansion ports are tidily hidden under a series of flaps along the sides. The Type II PC Card slot is as legacy as this VAIO gets, with three USB 2 ports, a mini-FireWire and an ExpressCard/54 slot catering for modern peripherals. A media card reader supporting Memory Stick and SD formats sits in the front, and a 0.37-megapixel webcam is hidden stylishly in the top bezel of the screen. Considering the AR's high-definition playback credentials (up to full 1080p), the HDCP-compliant HDMI output is welcome, and there's also S-Video in/out and a VGA output.

10/100 Ethernet and a 56K modem at the back right complement the 802.11a/b/g WLAN and Bluetooth, and the left side hosts the Blu-ray optical drive. It's worth noting that this also supports writing to dual-layer DVD+/-RW and CD writing, as well as dual-layer Blu-ray discs up to 50GB (slated to start shipping in August). Just note that even 25GB discs currently cost around $30 each. Fixed storage comes courtesy of two 80GB 5400rpm drives. They come set up as striped RAID0 to increase responsiveness and video editing performance.

Processing power comes in spades, with a 2.16GHz Core Duo T2600 (our review unit sported a T2500) and 1GB of RAM managing 1.07 in our application benchmarks. 3D capability is less all-out, but a Go 7600 GT chip is still decent. It provides enough power for today's games at modest settings, and is more than enough to cope with the demands of Windows Vista when it finally arrives.

You won't want to carry this notebook very far. At 3.8kg, it's more suited to a sedentary existence, and an appalling 1hr 37mins of battery life under light use is an inevitable result of the large, bright screen and the relatively small battery.

Sony's software bundle is attractive including both Adobe Premiere and Photoshop Elements packages and the requisite, if rather basic, Blu-ray authoring software. You also get VAIO recovery, which sits on a hidden partition and will restore the factory image in case of a Windows-based disaster.

This isn't a cheap notebook, and the inclusion of the Blu-ray drive means it isn't going to be stellar value either. It does manage to outmanoeuvre the Qosmio G30, though, despitecosting the same. Also, like all current HD DVD products, it's HD read-only. That makes the AR18GP vastly more suited to being an HD-editing workstation or similar, although it's worth noting that battery life is much poorer, and you'll lose 40GB of hard disk capacity too. That leaves the AR18GP as a wellimplemented, flexible and desirable product, but one that will ultimately appeal only to hard-core early adopters who either want or need such cuttingedge features.