In summary The HP Envy 15 is a high-end laptop with fast hardware that delivers good performance. The housing is sturdy and you will notice that while typing, for example. The strongest point of the Envy is the OLED screen with an enormous contrast and good calibration in three gamuts: sRGB, P3 and Adobe RGB. The battery life suffers from the OLED screen and comes out to only six hours at low load.

When it comes to high-end laptops with a good screen, there is a lot of choice. Dell has its XPS laptops, Lenovo has its expensive ThinkPad series and HP has the Specter line… Or is it Envy? Initially, HP positioned its Specters above the Envy laptops, which in turn are above the well-known Pavilions. That has changed, because for the fastest hardware in a 15 “- jacket you have to go to the Envy series and in that series HP sells even a model with OLED screen and a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels. The most expensive model has a Core i9 processor, 32 GB of memory and an RTX 2060 on board, and we look at that variant in this review. we of course to the speed of the laptop, but especially to that beautiful OLED screen.

The Envy 15 in its cheapest appearance with OLED screen costs 2000, which is a lot of money, but if you take the laptop out of the box, you get the feeling that you also get something in return. The housing is made of sleek silver-gray aluminum and looks beautiful. Not just to look at – that is also quite personal – but especially in terms of workmanship. The parts of the housing fit together neatly and all seams tap and straight. The laptop also feels like a sturdy block of aluminum and the housing cannot be impressed in any place. It is also a very thin laptop when you consider that a Core i9 processor with a tdp of 45 watts and an RTX 2060 – video card.

The only criticism on the housing is the screen. The hinge could have offered a bit more resistance, especially because it is touch sensitive. If you operate the screen manually, it can wobble back and forth and that’s a shame. Furthermore, the screen construction is quite sturdy. The back of it is also made of aluminum and offers sufficient strength.

At the top of the screen is the 720 p-webcam, which is not equipped with facial recognition on the Envy. It does have an electronically operated ‘privacy slider’, which on many other laptops is just a plastic slider that has to be operated by hand. The designers of the Envy 15 apparently didn’t want to see an unsightly slider on the high-end laptop, but they did want to give people the certainty that the webcam is physical covered. There is therefore a button on the keyboard to physically cover the webcam. A fingerprint scanner is available for biometric authentication, which is located next to the arrow keys on the keyboard.

The connections are on the sides of the housing and on the left there is a conventional USB connection. with a maximum transfer speed of 5Gbit / s, HDMI 2.0, two Thunderbolt 3 and a microSD card reader. If you’re using the laptop for image editing, we would have thought a fast SD card reader would be more appropriate, but it seems HP was keen to save space in the case and therefore opted for microSD. The right side has a cooling opening, with a headphone jack and a second USB 3.0 connection next to it.

The Envy’s speakers are facing upwards and give the best for a laptop. a good sound, so that conversations are fine. For that you should not have too much ambient noise, because the maximum sound production of the speakers is not too high.

Keyboard and touchpad Since there are speakers on either side of the keyboard, there is no space for a numeric keypad on the Envy. The keyboard has a backlight that can be dimmed in two positions and the keys seem to have quite a lot of travel, especially considering the thinness of the housing.

We have the travel measured and it turns out to be relatively large indeed. The BTO, in comparison, is a fairly chunky gaming laptop with a keyboard with quite a bit of travel. The XPS 15 and MacBook Pro are slimline appearances like the Envy, but when it comes to travel, the Envy does the best. In addition, the keyboard ticks pleasantly due to the sturdiness of the housing. The keyboard does not spring in any way when you hit the keys, which makes tapping the Envy very pleasant.

On the touchpad, especially the way what you press it on, HP also seems to have paid quite a bit of attention. The click you make when you press the touchpad is fairly ‘deep’ and has pleasant feedback. The surface of the touchpad is made of glass, which is the standard for high-end laptops, but it is good to see that HP has not cut back on it.