Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the Dynabook Portege X30L-J

Dynabook sounds like a new kid on the block, but it is actually the spiritual successor of the Toshiba brand. After being fully acquired by Sharp in 2018, the name of the company was completely changed to Dynabook, to give it a new fresh name, while keeping the history and experience of Toshiba.

Today we have one of their devices, named the Portege X30L-J. No, it’s not Protege, we double-checked. A spelling mistake or not, this might be the lightest device on the market, weighing a little over 900 grams, despite packing up to a Core i7-1165G7.

Today we present you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Dynabook Portege X30L-J.

Dynabook Portege X30L-J: Full Specs / In-depth Review


4 reasons to BUY the Dynabook Portege X30L-J

1. Design and build quality

The magnesium unibody makes for an incredibly thin and lightweight device, with a weight of 907 grams and a profile of 17.78 mm. The body feels extremely light, almost like you’re holding a feather in hand. The magnesium alloy also gives the laptop some much-needed sturdiness, as it offered decent resistance when we tried to flex it. The lid, on the other hand, bends a lot. Overall, the laptop is fragile, so you would have to be careful with it.

The lid doesn’t open with one hand, despite the hinges feeling well balanced. Opening the lid reveals relatively thin bezels and a set of great peripherals. The keyboard has quite the long key travel, clicky feedback, a Pointer stick, and some shortcut buttons. The touchpad does have its own clicking mechanism, while the dedicated buttons are for the pointer stick.


2. Display quality

The 13.3-inch Full HD IPS panel here offers comfortable viewing angles, a maximum brightness of 468 nits in the middle of the screen, 435 nits as an average for the entire display area, and a maximum deviation of 13%. The contrast ratio is great – 1330:1. The display covers 97% of the sRGB color gamut.

In terms of color accuracy, the panel was already accurate enough even before we applied our Design and Gaming profile, which brought down the dE value to 0.7. Here are the results from the test with both the factory settings (left) and with our profile applied (right).


Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Dynabook Portege X30L-J configurations with 13.3″ Sharp JQ133M1JW41 (SHP1488) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS panel.

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount


3. I/O

The laptop offers incredibly wide I/O, despite being so thin and light. You get a total of two USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) ports, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI connector, a MicroSD card reader, an Ethernet port, and a 3.5 mm audio jack.


4. Upgradeability

Despite being such a small device, it offers decent, but not perfect upgradeability. There are either 8GB or 16GB of soldered memory, while there is also a single SODIMM slot. Storage-wise, there is one M.2 PCIe x4 slot.

Here is our detailed teardown video, which shows how to get access to both the SODIMM and SSD slots.


1 reason NOT to buy the Dynabook Portege X30L-J

1. Speakers

The speakers on the laptop are positioned on the bottom, with two small speaker cutouts.

The speaker setup also didn’t fare well in our test, delivering quiet audio with unimpressive quality, along with deviations across the entire frequency range.


All Dynabook Portege X30L-J configurations:

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