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Despite its relatively high price, the Sony Vaio VPCJ21L0E is a rather modest all-in-one PC. It has touchscreen display that has a 1,920×1,080 resolution, although its disc drive doesn’t support Blu-ray, though, so you’ll have to get your HD video sources elsewhere. The VPCJ21L0E also lacks the HDMI inputs that allow you to use its screen for games consoles or Blu-ray players, and there’s no built-in TV tuner, either.
You can always opt for a USB TV tuner, but you’ll have to sacrifice one of the PC’s paltry four ports to do so. There are two USB3 ports at the front left of the chassis and another two standard USB ports at the back, next to a Gigabit Ethernet port. Fortunately, unlike almost every other all-in-one on the market, the wireless receiver for the keyboard and mouse is built into the PC, rather than a USB dongle, so you won’t have to waste any ports there.
It’s just a shame that the quality of the supplied peripherals is so poor. The keyboard is full-sized but rattly, poorly angled and flimsy-feeling; the keys are flat and widely spaced, but we found that we were prone to slip from one to the next. The mouse is similarly lightweight, but its response to clicks feels surprisingly poor.
There’s little to fault with the quality of the 21.5in display. There’s little sign of the slight grittiness that some touchscreens have. It’s evenly lit, with excellent contrast among dark tones and rich, lifelike shading of natural colours. It’s a little warm, which makes skin tones look great, but gives the faintest of pinkish hints to flat areas of white or grey. Its glossy finish can produce unwanted reflections if you’re viewing dark scenes in a brightly lit room.
It’s smaller than the displays on most of the all-in-one PCs we’ve seen and its low position and wide bezel make it even feel smaller than that of Apple’s 21.5in iMac, which has the same sized display and a more elegant chassis. The VPCJ21L0E is around £150 cheaper than an iMac, but it’s not as powerful. With a 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-2410M mobile processor and 4GB of memory, it achieved an overall score of just 55 in our benchmark test. Its performance is good enough for most desktop users – you’ll easily be able to browse multiple web pages or run photo-editing software – but it’s not an ideal choice for fast results from processor-intensive tasks such as video encoding.
Its graphics performance wasn’t particularly good either. The integrated graphics capabilities of the Core i5 processor aren’t up to serious 3D gaming, although we finally managed to get Dirt 3 running at a decent frame rate of 31fps once we turned all its quality settings down to low and disabled anti-aliasing.
This extremely basic PC has few other features beyond a memory card reader and 3.5mm mic and headphone ports. You’ll probably want to make use of those, as the integrated speaker sounds fuzzy and muffled, with a harsh edge to high notes. If the VPCJ21L0E was £300 cheaper, it’d be a very reasonable buy for a student or bedroom PC, particularly if space was at a premium. However, at this price, you can do much better by buying the powerful and versatile Asus ET2410INTS.
